Category Archives: Psychotic Disorders

by | August 26, 2017 · 7:36 PM

Can OCD Be the Root Cause of Other Mental Disorders? If So, Can It Possibly Be the Cause of Schizophrenia in Some People?

Answered on Quora. 

There are definitely some other disorders you can get as a consequence of having OCD, such as Depression, Panic Disorder, Social Anxiety, and suicidality. However, schizophrenia and psychosis is not one of them.

But many OCD’ers worry that they may get schizophrenia or that they are in the process of getting it. Sufferers call this S-OCD, Schiz OCD or better yet OCD with the Schizophrenia or Psychosis Theme. This is simply someone with OCD who has adopted the theme of a fear of going psychotic. As with most other forms of OCD, the fear can cause symptoms that seem to mimic the fear itself. In this case, it can cause symptoms that mimic schizophrenia or other psychoses on the surface, however, careful prodding and questioning generally makes a differential diagnosis between OCD and Schizophrenia fairly straightforward.

Nevertheless, many S-OCD’ers sadly get diagnosed with schizophrenia or other psychoses by ignorant clinicians and as a result are medicated inappropriately. This subtype of OCD is very poorly known and often misdiagnosed.

I run into S-OCD’ers with incorrect diagnoses of Psychotic Depression, Schizoaffective Disorder, Schizophrenia, etc. on a fairly regular basis. The fact that when OCD is very bad, OCD’ers appear psychotic on the surface (but are not psychotic) confuses matters even more. It takes an experienced clinician to figure out what is OCD appearing psychotic and what is an actual psychosis.

At times the two illnesses are found in the same person, and sometimes in these cases it can be hard to figure out where the OCD ends and the schizophrenia begins or figuring out if a given symptom is best seen as one illness or the other. When the illnesses occur in the same person, it is sometimes called schizo-obsessive disorder. These people, who have much better insight than other schizophrenics, sometimes have a tendency to hide symptoms, which makes diagnosis even more confusing.

But having OCD is not going to give you schizophrenia. That’s not possible.

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Filed under Anxiety Disorders, Depression, Mental Illness, Mood Disorders, OCD, Psychology, Psychopathology, Psychotherapy, Psychotic Disorders, Schizophrenia, Symptoms

by | July 20, 2017 · 3:11 AM

Do Therapists Ever Think Their Clients are Unfixable?

Question from Quora:

Some people are utterly unfixable or even improvable, but they are quite rare.

There are clients who are just too far gone, and they cannot be helped at all. It is as if the person were a ceramic bowl that was dropped on a hard floor. The bowl is now in 100 pieces, and the person who dropped it is on the ground looking at the pieces and throwing up their hands. “Where do I start?” he asks in exasperation.

All sociopaths and psychopaths are unfixable by their very nature. We can’t cure the sociopathy and psychopathy because they don’t want to get better. They enjoy being antisocial, and they do not wish to change. However, we can get them to change their behavior. For instance, a homicidal sociopath may show up in the office. A good therapist may be able to convince this sociopath that acting on their homicidal fantasies would be one of the stupidest things that they could ever do. This sociopath may then be able to go through life without killing an innocent person. So we can’t fix sociopaths, but we can change their behavior somewhat, tone it down, or reduce the amount of damage they do to society.

All paraphilias are unfixable by their very nature. The paraphilia quite literally will not and cannot go away. It’s etched in stone.

Schizophrenia is largely unfixable. They need a great deal of medication, and even then in most cases, they are repeatedly hospitalized. A few can go on to lead somewhat normal or even successful lives, but these people still need continuous medication and regular psychotherapy. In addition, they need frequent interventions to stay out of the hospital.

Many illnesses such as OCD, Bipolar Disorder and Chronic Major Depression are unfixable by psychotherapy. Most of these people will need medication for the rest of their lives. However, psychotherapy can improve their conditions a lot at least in the first and last cases.

Long-term suicidality is very hard to fix. It tends to become chronic with repeated attempts over the years. The suicidal person is typically defiant and is furious with you for challenging their suicidality. You are expected to sympathize with their condition, which is actually a very bad idea. Most suicidal people are what I would call “defiantly suicidal.”

Personality disorders are generally incurable. Theoretically, they could be fixed, but these people almost never present for therapy, and when they do, it is often at the behest of others, and they do not really wish to be there or get anything done. People with personality disorders, like sociopaths, literally do not want to get better. They like their personality disorder, and they are incredibly resistant to change. There are some case reports of cures of personality disorders, but in general the prognosis is grave.

I have never been able to fix long term low self esteem, and I have tried with a few people. There is something about that condition that hammers itself into the brain as if into concrete. I do not know why, but long-term low self-esteem seems to be one of the hardest psychological problems to fix. Why this is, I have no idea. Perhaps someone else can offer some ideas.

In many cases, long-term mental disorders simply cannot be fixed or cured. However, with psychotherapy and drugs, people can often get much better than they were before. We need to stop thinking in terms of cures and start thinking in terms of amelioration.

I realize that many clinicians insist that most people can be fixed or cured of long-term conditions, but I think they are lying. They are probably trying to drum up business. Many clinicians fear that if word got out that a lot of long-term mentally ill people cannot be fixed or cured, people would stop coming in for therapy. There goes their paycheck. Therapists are a lot more money-oriented than most people believe, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I know this field very well.

Clinicians have nothing to worry about. Even if a lot of conditions could only be ameliorated and not fixed, I am sure a lot of folks would show up to try to get some improvement. Some mental disorders are so painful that any improvement feels like a miracle cure to the client. A lot of people have given up on being cured anyway, just want to at least get better and are quite happy to do so.

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Filed under Anxiety Disorders, Depression, Health, Medicine, Mental Illness, Mood Disorders, OCD, Personality Disorders, Psychology, Psychopathology, Psychotherapy, Psychotic Disorders, Schizophrenia, Sex, Sociopathy

by | July 20, 2017 · 3:10 AM

The Untreatable Borderline Personality Disorder Client: A Therapeutic Nightmare

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)is one of the hardest disorders of all to treat. It can be improved with some therapies, but the road is long and hard. Many seem to go on for years or decades with little or no improvement. There are reports of cures, and I am familiar with a woman whose BPD cleared up at age 55 after having come on in childhood. That’s probably a typical cure. Decades of nasty illness followed by a lifting of the illness in middle age.

Many mental disorders improve in middle age, and even many personality disorders improve during this age period.

Schizophrenia often ‘burns out” in middle age, and florid positive symptoms are replaced by more negative symptoms.

Many anxiety disorders attentuate in middle age.

Even psychopaths often get better or at least less destructive in middle age, as many of them also burn out in a similar fashion as schizophrenics. A number of highly antisocial psychopathic men get better in middle age as the antisocial behavior attentuates. It is often replaced by depression, heavy drinking and a pessimistic, cynical, imbittered and misanthropic person who nonetheless does little damage to society anymore.

It should be noted the clients with BPD vary widely in their symptom pathology.  Some are much more functional than others. Quite a few can even function well at their jobs all day, but when they come home from work, they fall apart and shift into full BPD pathology.

However, some people with BPD are so ill that they seem nearly untreatable. It is these people who will be the subject of this post, not BPD’s in general. These people seem so far gone and broken that one wonders how anyone could ever even begin to put them back together again. I suppose some progress could be made, but the damage is so severe that I have a hard time seeing how even the best therapist could possibly fix these people in any significant way.

A typical case might be a young woman who, only in her late 20’s to early 30’s, already has 8 -13 suicide attempts and many hospitalizations behind her. She goes into the hospital on a regular basis. Therapy seems to do nothing but feed her pathology as she manipulates gullible new therapists to believe her lies, nonsense, and projections as the new therapist confuses symptom pathology with the truth. Drugs do almost nothing.

Diagnosis itself is often difficult because the BPD is so severe that the person often appears psychotic/delusional. One wonders what are delusions and what are not. Even the delusions do not seem to last for long, as they are dropped, changed around, added to or substituted in a wildly chaotic fashion.

Usually there is a lot of combativeness and involvement with the court system, as the extreme rage leads a litigious person.

Splitting is severe and textbook.

Self-image is so unstable that the person almost literally adopts the full personality and even persona of whomever is on their radar at the moment. The clinician needs to be prepared that this person will so identify with the clinician that they will adopt the therapist’s image and persona as their own. Boundaries nearly do not exist for these people, and they often fall in love with their therapists, try to seduce them, or on the other hand become furious at them to where sessions became rage attacks at the therapist, and the therapists is at odds of how to respond without violating ethics.

The client can become overtly suicidal even during sessions, and infatuation with the therapist can quickly split to where the therapist is the source of all evil. Homicidal threats and homicidal-suicidal threats against the therapist may now appear. The client then hospitalizes themselves due the “horrible trauma from the evil,  incompetent therapist” and soon finds sympathetic new therapist, typically a feminist woman, to unload her story on. The new female therapist forms an alliance with the client against the “evil male” former therapist and accuses him of damaging the client.

Commonly, the therapist gets angry and tells off the client. This leads to abandonment and a vengeance agenda against the therapist, who has now “irreparably damaged” the BPD and “caused them to spiral out of control.” Be prepared to get accused of abandonment, causing severe trauma in the client and making them dramatically worse. The client may become hospitalized due to allegations of damage from an incompetent therapist.

These people are so difficult and chaotic that many clinicians refuse to see Borderline patients. Some are on the record as saying that when they say a Borderline client coming their way, they hide under their desk until they go away. For a lot of therapists, these clients are nothing but trouble, and endless parade of drama and chaos. Therapy itself is chaotic, mercurial, and wild with severe splitting and often extreme idealization of the therapist for good or ill or both, interrupted by fairly regular hospitalizations. The therapist begins to wonder what’s in it for them and thinks you could not pay them enough to suffer through such clients. These clients make an excellent argument that therapeutic abandonment is the proper choice with some clients.

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Filed under Anxiety Disorders, Borderline, Mental Illness, Personality Disorders, Psychology, Psychopathology, Psychotherapy, Psychotic Disorders, Schizophrenia

by | July 14, 2017 · 12:20 AM

Do Psychologists Make Their Patients Aware of the Diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder or Sociopathy?

I recently answered this question on Quora.

Do Psychologists Make their Patients Aware of the Diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder or Sociopathy?

These personality disorders seem to carry a lot of social stigma, therefore are patients made aware of their diagnosis or does the therapist just continue behavioral therapy to treat the symptoms rather than informing them of the diagnosis?

I am not a psychologist. I am a counselor. I only work with one disorder, OCD, and I can quite accurately diagnose that condition, I assure you. Nevertheless, I am not allowed to give out legal DSM diagnoses. However, I can obviously give out my opinion on a diagnosis. I can also tell the person my opinion on what they do not have. For instance, I have gotten many clients with OCD who have been misdiagnosed with some sort of psychosis. I am an expert at telling the two apart. I simply tell them that in my opinion, they are not psychotic. Then I tell them to fire your clinician and go get a new one that will recognize the difference between OCD and psychosis (many clinicians are very poor at telling these apart).

Other than OCD/psychosis, I also have to make differential dx on OCD/sociopathy, violent thoughts, etc., OCD/pedophilia, pedophilic thoughts, etc. and OCD/homosexuality. In a limited number of cases, I told clients that in my opinion, they did not have OCD but instead had some psychotic disorder, or sociopathic traits, or pedophilia, or that they were homosexuals. Most of this differential dx is pretty straightforward.

I have never had any narcissistic clients, God forbid clients with NPD. One thing nice about working with OCD clients is that they are usually very nice people. Not all of them, mind you. But if they are not nice, there is often some other reason, for instance, Borderline Personality Disorder in an OCD client could possibly make them impossibly vicious, cruel, unstable, not to mention extremely crazy, far crazier than any OCD sufferer ever gets.

OCD by its very nature strikes nice people. The fact that they are so nice, meek and kind is actually one of the main reasons that they have the disorder in the first place! For the most part, only nice people get it, and the nicer you are, the more likely you are to get it. I will leave it at that for the moment and give you a chance to think of why that might be. I know why but it goes beyond the scope of this post at the moment.

But in general, I never even give my opinion on other anxiety disorders or on any mood disorders or personality disorders. I only rarely see clients who have psychotic disorders, and the two that I have seen were already diagnosed. I also very rarely see people with personality disorders, and the few that I have seen were all females with Borderline PD diagnoses. I did see one woman for two sessions with obvious Borderline Personality Disorder, but I had not figured it out yet in the first session, and by the second session, I declined to diagnose her. She has already been diagnosed by a psychiatrist from afar anyway. So apparently I am guilty of failing to dx a Borderline PD client.

The session was about her OCD, not her BPD and she was very nice through the whole session. It would have ruined the whole thing if I told her she had BPD, and I doubt if she would have accepted it anyway. At any rate, I am not allowed to give legal dx’s anyway, so it’s apparently proper for me not to diagnose someone!

That only comes up if there is differential diagnosis. I simply say that I not only can I not legally give these out but that I am not qualified to work with any condition other than OCD, which I can actually work very well with. If they want me to work on their depression or whatever, I tell them that I have no expertise or training in that area so I can guarantee nothing and it would be similar to talking to a friend or family member.

If I were able to give out diagnoses, I think I would simply give them out in most every case. Possibly if it might make a suicidal patient go over the edge, I might decline to give one out. But I will disagree with the clinicians below. In my opinion, physicians and other medical professionals in addition to all licensed clinicians should give out whatever diagnosis is appropriate. I feel it is a moral matter. The patient or client is simply owed a diagnosis on the part of the clinician or MD and I feel it would be remiss of the clinician or MD not to tell the patient what is wrong with them, and I mean everything that is wrong with them.

This is just my personal opinion and I believe there no ethical rules on the subject. Also I respect the clinicians below for not giving out diagnoses in cases where it would not be helpful. I simply feel that this is a case were morals or even the categorical imperative trumps pragmatics or even common sense.

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Filed under Anxiety Disorders, Borderline, Ethics, Health, Medicine, Mental Illness, Narcissistic, OCD, Personality Disorders, Philosophy, Psychology, Psychopathology, Psychotherapy, Psychotic Disorders

by | June 25, 2017 · 12:34 AM

False Memories in OCD

False memories are quite common when OCD gets bad. I have dealt with a number of people who were going round and round about false memories. They are not an extremely common symptom, but you do see them sometimes when the illness is bad. It’s generally a sign of a bad illness.

Ms. Z was periodically convinced that she killed people. She would have a conversation with someone for 5-10 minutes, then walk away ,and then suddenly think that she had killed them somehow during the conversation. Perhaps she had suddenly swung her fist out and beat them to death? Perhaps she had pulled out a knife and hacked them to death? Perhaps she had shot them with a gun? She would have all sorts of false memories of how she killed these people.

In the course of these false memories, she would become 100% certain that she had killed that person she was talking to in that store that day. In the next few days, she would ask around to people she knew if anyone got murdered or if she killed someone in the store that day. Of course she would always be told no. I’m sure her friends must have tired of answering these weird questions. As soon as she was told that no murder had occurred, immediately the firmly held belief that she had killed that person would vanish, and she would never think about it again. Until a little while later when she would be talking to someone again and then walk away and once again become convinced that she had killed that person…

Another woman, Ms. S., was a young college student. She was at a large California university that had a lot of long, winding trails with undergrowth. There were deep gullies on the sides of the paths that were overgrown with foliage. Ms. S. would be walking down the paths and as she walked, she passed all sorts of people coming her way. At some point, she would suddenly get an idea that she had grabbed one of the people coming her way and thrown them down into one of the gullies.

She had a pretty clear memory of who the person was she threw down there and exactly how she had done it. She would be overwhelmed with guilt, and she would take off down into the gully searching for the “body” of the person she had thrown down into the gulch. She did this on a pretty regular basis, and eventually the university wondered what she was doing floundering around in the gullies, and they sent the university police down there to see what she was up to. After a while, it become clear that she needed to go to the university counseling center.

In both cases, the women received a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder in addition to OCD. This was an incorrect diagnosis, and it was based on the fact that for a short while after Ms. S  was clamboring around in the gullies or after Ms. Z became convinced that she had somehow killed someone she was talking to, that both women were absolutely convinced that they had either thrown someone down into the gully or had killed the person they were talking to in the store.

The diagnosis was incorrect because as soon as the women were told that there was no one in the gully or that they had not killed the person in the store, the “delusion” completely vanished and they didn’t think of it again until next time. Delusions just don’t go away like that. It’s not a very strongly held conviction if can vanish with a mere word of reassurance.

We look at the whole process in a holistic sense. What is the nature of the process? Is this a characterological process (personality disorder), a mood process (mood disorder like Bipolar Disorder or Depression), an anxiety process (OCD, PTSD, GAD, Panic Disorder) or a psychotic process (schizophrenia, manic psychosis, psychotic depression, schizoaffective disorder)? It is important to look at things in an intuitive sense and get the “smell” or “feel” of what the basic process is that you are dealing with.

In the case above, this is an anxiety process, specifically an OCD process. It’s not a psychotic process, despite the fact that it superficially resembles a psychosis.

Some of these folks with false memories actually go to the police station and turn themselves in for crimes that they did not commit.

“Hi, I am here to report a murder.”

“Ok, what happened?”

“Well I think I killed someone last night.”

“You think you killed someone?”

“Yes.”

“Well, where did this happen?”

“I am not sure. I think maybe the bridge over the river.”

“What time did this happen?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe midnight?”

“Who was the victim?”

“I’m not sure. I think it was a man, maybe.”

“What weapon was used?”

“I am not completely sure. I think it was a knife maybe.”

After a while the police started to get the message. He was not there to report a murder at all. He was there to find out whether or not he was a murderer!

As the conversation degenerated, the man started repeating, “How do you know if you killed someone or not?”

The police did not know what to say to that. After he left, the police were talking among themselves. “That’s so weird,” one of them said. “What does he mean, ‘How do I know if I killed someone or not?’ How could you not know something like that? That’s so weird.” The cops were shaking their heads.

 

As you can see, false memories are quite common in OCD when it gets very bad.

I dealt with them myself at one point in 1985 or 1986. I have to admit it was a pretty nutty way of thinking. I was so ashamed of my false memories (which I temporarily convinced myself were true) that I never told anyone except for a couple of therapists. I have not dealt with any false memory nonsense in over 30 years, and I hope I never have to deal with that again. It’s truly a crazy way to think.

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Filed under Anxiety Disorders, Law enforcement, Mental Illness, Mood Disorders, OCD, Personality Disorders, Psychology, Psychopathology, Psychotic Disorders

by | June 7, 2017 · 6:08 AM

Psychopathology of Serial Murderers

The primary problem with almost all serial killers is simply ASPD, Antisocial Personality Disorder, derived sociopathy or primary psychopathy. It is present in almost 100% of such cases. Most everything else is rather secondary to this primary character disorder, which is the most prominent symptom.

Very rare is the serial killer without this disorder, although there have been a few. I remember a long-distance trucker who turned himself when he walked into a Northern California police station with a woman’s breast in his top shirt pocket. He had camped out in forests while trucking and had picked up women and killed them. He kept the body of one in the truck for three or four days and drove around with it.

Experts said he was quite unusual in that they said he actually felt bad about what he had done. I wonder how bad he really felt though. You could not get me to drive around in a truck with a dead woman in the back for very long. I would go into severe panic pretty fast, would stop the truck, get out and start walking or probably running away. I would not be able to walk around with a woman’s breast in my shirt for long either. I would completely panic almost right away, take the shirt off, throw it on the ground and start running. But then I am a pretty guilty type person with a strong conscience.

Based on that, while I am sure he may have felt some guilt for his killings, the fact that he was able to drive around in a truck with a dead woman in the  back for 3-4 days shows without completely flipping out shows to me that he didn’t feel that much guilt, certainly not on the level that most of us would. And the fact that he could rather calmly walk into a police station with a cut off breast in his pocket without flying into total panic shows to me that he didn’t feel that bad about it. So guilt, even when it is present, is not as strong as in most of us, otherwise they would not have even done such horrible things in the first place.

Sexual sadism is also often present, and I have heard that Sadistic Personality Disorder is very common. Juvenile delinquency, voyeurism, exhibitionism, burglary, prowling, petty thievery, etc. typically precede the serial killings. When the serial killer starts killing, he usually has a fairly long rap sheet of more minor offenses. The murders are best seen as an escalation of a chronic criminal character type.

The ones who kill children are typically though not always preferential or fixated pedophiles. Certainly the ones who kill only children are preferential pedophiles. There is a type of pedophile called a mysoped, which is a sadistic pedophile. They are not very common. I doubt if 5% of pedophiles are like this, but these people are very dangerous. Probably almost all serial child killers are mysopeds and these crimes often have a sexual basis.

95% of rapists are the type that rarely if ever go serial, but the sadistic rapist, composed of no more than 5% of rapists, is very dangerous. Most if not all rapist serial killers are sadistic rapists.

The rage rapist is dangerous, but he generally does not intend to kill his victim although he assault her. If she fights back or gets difficult, he can fly into a rage and beat her so badly that she dies but again he usually does not intend to kill. I doubt if these types go serial much if at all. Serial killers intend to kill; rage rapists do not.

Malignant narcissism, the disorder, believe it or not, of our wonderful President, is also present sometimes. Ted Bundy was a malignant narcissist. Yes, our wonderful President has the same mental illness as Ted Bundy! Comforting thought.

A few have Schizoid Personality Disorder, and some of the more disturbed ones have Borderline Personality Disorder.

Schizotypal, Paranoid and Narcissistic Personality Disorders are rare if ever seen in serial killers. Schizotypals are probably too disorganized and decompensated and just out and out strange to commit such crimes. The serial killer must blend in, and schizotypals do not do that. A few schizotypals have committed mass murders. James Holmes the Aurora Batman Theater Shooter, was a notable case. But note that he was caught immediately.

Paranoid PD is rarely if ever seen. These people tend to be rather retiring and like to hide away from a hostile world. They also do not like to call attention to themselves from a hostile world. They are suspicious and distrustful by nature and this makes it hard for them to blend in well with ordinary society as serial killers often do.

Narcissists are usually too self-centered to kill. While narcissists are often very mean, the disorder is usually well-controlled in that the rage rarely escalates to homicide. There have been a few cases of NPD’s committing mass murder, usually of their families.

The case of Jeffrey MacDonald, the mass murdering physician of Fatal Vision, seems to be such a case. This is a superb true crime case by the way.

Also narcissists think that if they kill, they will get caught, and if they are in prison or jail they will not be able to live this wonderful life they are supposed to be killing. They are “too cool to kill.” Killing would mess up all their wonderful plans to exploit others and hold them up to contempt by millions of people, which the narcissist would have a hard time taking. The narcissist is “too good for prison.” Prison would be such a crushing blow to their self-image that it would very hard to take.

However, malignant narcissists can be very dangerous because this is a combination of psychopathy, sadism, Paranoid PD and Narcissistic PD. When you weaponize NPD with paranoia, sadism and particularly psychopathy, you create a dangerous illness.

Cluster C Personality Disorders like Passive-Aggressive Personality Disorder, Self-Defeating Personality Disorder, Dependent Personality Disorder and Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder are rarely if ever present in these types. These are PD’s where aggression is mostly displayed passively, and serial killers display aggression actively, not passively.

Mood disorders do not seem to be common. Bipolar Disorder is not common, and serial killers are rarely if ever depressed. They displace guilt and loathing outwards instead of pushing it inside of themselves as depressives do. Depressives are passive, and depression acts as sort of a freezing agent in that it tends to immobilize people by its nature. Men in general tend to either experience less depression than women or mask it with other things such as anger and rage, drinking, drugs, gambling, promiscuity or even workaholism. It is simply not acceptable as a man to be depressed, so depressed men simply channel their depression into other things and say they are not depressed, they are just drunks or workaholics, for instance.

Substance and alcohol abuse issues are quite common with serial killers, but the better ones are more sober, as drinkers and dopers tend to be scattered and unreliable and serial killers must be on the ball  24-7.

Only a few are psychotic. 2% of serial killers are psychotic. Psychotic people can barely organize a trip to the bathroom. How are they going to plot out elaborate and professional serial homicides?

They are motivated by many things, but your typical rape-murders of murders of attractive young women almost always have a sexual component. I would call these serial killings lust murders. The Germans coined the term. Even among the lust-murders, there are a number of different types. Some are motivated by purely sexual desires, others get off specifically on killing and the power gained from it, others are hunter types who get pleasure from the hunt and chase as if they were hunting an animal, which they are of course, but when we refer to hunters, we are always talking about hunters of non-human animals.

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Filed under Alcohol, Antisocial, Borderline, Crime, Criminology, Depressants, Depression, Intoxicants, Mental Illness, Mood Disorders, Narcissism, Narcissistic, Pedophilia, Personality, Personality Disorders, Psychology, Psychopathology, Psychotic Disorders, Schizotypal, Serial Killers, Sex, Sociology, Sociopathy

by | April 14, 2017 · 8:08 PM

Resolved: Transgenderism Is a Mental Illness

RL: I work in mental health, and I have to diagnose people a lot, or at least offer my opinion of a diagnosis as I cannot give out legal DSM diagnoses . I even have to do differential diagnosis constantly where I have to figure out which of two diagnoses a person has. Believe me, these cases can be very confusing.

Magneto: In your opinion, is being transgender a mental illness? I mean, I am aware of the statistics that gays/trans people have a far higher suicide rate than heterosexuals, which would seem to suggest that it is a mental disorder.

But it’s kind of hard to think trans are mentally ill when you are looking at a fucking sexy ass Asian ladyboy who is far hotter than any real woman you’ve ever been with. To be honest, I hope trans continues to become more mainstream and more men do the transition into females. Fine with me, more food to choose from, in my opinion.

Ha ha. So, more pussy, even if it’s fake pussy, eh? I’m not sure I am down with that.

 

Is transgenderism a mental illness. Of course it is. In most cases anyway. And the rate has gone up 600X since the 1970’s. If it is some actual biological condition in the brain like sexual orientation, one would not expect the rate to skyrocket like that.

Rates of biological conditions don’t change much. The rate of homosexuality has probably been 3% for a very long time. Homosexuality appears to be an incurable biological condition that gets wired up in their brains somehow. It is a developmental disorder like left-handedness and a number of other things. Something goes wrong hormonally in utero, and the result is male or in some cases female homosexuality. As it is a developmental disorder, would you expect the rates of left-handedness to go up 600X? Real biological conditions just don’t work like that. Why would the hormonal aberrations that cause homosexuality have gone up 600X? They wouldn’t. They would stay at some consistent rate that is close the the rate of things going wrong in utero.

Hence except in a few cases, transgenderism is not a biological disorder. I really feel for these boys who feel like girls from age 2 or whatever. I am willing to consider a biological disorder there.

Yet a biological disorder can also be a mental illness. Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder and even OCD look like biological disorders, and all are also mental illnesses.

These seems to be a “fad” disorder that a lot of folks are developing on their own in a similar way to how these therapists create mental illness in previously healthy girls who got molested. It’s a cool way of going crazy.

Studies in China show that ~3% of the population feels as if they are the opposite sex. So if we let this thing explode, we could end up with a 3% tranny population. In the past, these people became homosexuals (in itself a sort of transgenderism) or perhaps feminine men and masculine women.

When I was growing up in the 1970’s, we had this idea that all men and women have masculine and feminine components, even heterosexual ones. Just because a man has a feminine side or a woman a masculine one doesn’t mean he is not a man and she is not a woman, nor does it mean that either one is a homosexual.

I have a pretty strong feminine side myself, as many people used to think I was gay or bi. I’m not a Man’s Man at all. I’m not macho enough for that. I’m a Ladies’ Man who prefers the company of women. Most Ladies’ Men are not as masculine as Man’s Men.

I worry that if I were growing up today, I might have been sucked into this nonsense and decided that I was a tranny and I was really a woman or something insane like that.

If a man thinks he is a woman or a woman thinks she is a man, that is known as a delusion. It’s just not true. So they’re psychotic in a sense. And the treatment (sex change operation) doesn’t appear to make them any mentally healthier. So why do it? If the treatment doesn’t help the person, we stop doing it.

13% of people who have sex changes actually re-transition. So men who turn into women turn back into men, and women who think they are men turn back into women. If it was a real condition, one would not expect to see that. Homosexuals don’t suddenly decide to be straight. Left-handed people don’t decide to be right-handed one day. Transgenderism in childhood is highly transitory. 73% of transgender children are cured by adulthood. That is, by the time they are 18, they have abandoned the idea that they are the opposite sex. Biological conditions do not have such high spontaneous cure rates.

There have been quite a few spontaneous cures of transgenderism even in adulthood. There are a number of cases where a man was in therapy for transgenderism, and he showed up for therapy one day and announced that he’s no longer transgender. He’s really a man and realizes that and feels like one now. Then he gets up and walks out of the office. Just like that.

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Filed under Anxiety Disorders, Asia, Biology, China, Gender Studies, Girls, Heterosexuality, Homosexuality, Mental Illness, Mood Disorders, OCD, Psychology, Psychopathology, Psychotherapy, Psychotic Disorders, Regional, Schizophrenia, Science, Sex, Social Problems, Sociology

by | March 25, 2017 · 1:14 AM

Serial Killers – Psychotic or Psychopathic?

Gary Palin: I see your points Robert, and your way more knowledgeable about these types of psychotic sociopaths than I am. When I saw the picture of Libby in the hat and how young and innocent she looked, this crime really struck a chord with me. When I was younger growing up in the 70’s this was relatively “uncommon,” but there were some (Charles Manson, etc) Also there were very few homosexuals, at least out in the open, and there were no transgender people ( not that I have disdain for them). This goes for where I grew up, but maybe in liberal California it was different for you.

I just wonder if this escalating type of violent crimes against women has anything to do with “feminism” and men feeling slighted and emasculated, and this is their way of rebelling against women. I think there may be a lot of truth to this.

I would bet in the 1950’s where divorce was uncommon, and families were mostly all the patriarchal type, when men were the head of the household, I think people and families were a lot happier than in today’s world, even though they didn’t have as much material wealth. Maybe you should do a blog on that subject, as you’re truly a student of human nature.

As far as being a student of human nature, I work in mental health. I have dealt with very few psychotic or psychopathic people, but I often have to rule out psychopathy or psychosis. In the group I am dealing with, I almost always rule it out. But to rule it out, you have to understand it.

Actually there were quite a few serials running around in the 1970’s. I like to think of the 1970’s as the Decade of the Serial Killer. There were an amazing number of them running around right here in California. We regularly had them running loose here in the LA area. Randy Kraft, the Hillside Strangler, the Toolbox Killers, the Sunset Strip Killers, Rodney Alcala, William Bonin, on and on. In California proper there was the Zodiac, the Hitchhiker Killer, and the Keddie Murders. Ted Bundy was running around the West.

My Mom thinks she saw Bonin and crew pick up a young male hitchhiker on a freeway entrance in Garden Grove. She thought that may have been the last ride that boy ever took.

A good friend of mine had an encounter with Randy Kraft and drank some beer and smoked some pot with him. The beer was one of Kraft’s specialty Valium-laced beers, but my friend caught on that something was wrong. Kraft tried to stop him from leaving the car, but my friend screamed at Kraft like a maniac, and Kraft was taken aback and let him go.

Back then we did not have DNA and advanced forensics, so most of these guys killed a number of times (4-10) before they were caught. It was so much easier to be a serial back then due to the more primitive forensics. Serials often targeted regular females or males, but now a lot of serials are targeting druggy street prostitutes, truck stop whores, and other marginal women whose disappearance is not even known because they are so far outside of society. It is quite hard to catch these killers because they are targeting such marginal women who hardly anyone even knows. When the serial starts targeting ordinary members of society, it’s a bit easier to catch them.

I do not think the rate of rapes or rape-murders of women has gone up since the 1970’s. I have heard that child killings have been at a flat rate of ~150/year since the 1970’s. If anything, I would assume the rate of rapes and rape-murders has gone down since the 1970’s. Sure, there has been a much-needed backlash against the sexist hate movement called Feminism, but it doesn’t seem like men’s rage over it is causing us to rape and kill women at any higher rate than we ever had. Instead a lot of men seem to be dropping out of dating and dealing with women altogether for fear of a sexual harassment, sexual assault or fake rape charge. See the Men Going Their Own Way Movement for more on this phenomenon.

The concepts of psychosis and psychopathy are often confused in the public mind. How many times have you heard about “psychotic killers?” Thing is, when someone says that, they are almost never referring to killers who are actually psychotic. Instead they are referring to psychopathic killers and confusing them with people who are psychotic. Most people do not understand the difference between these psychological states, and this is the reason for the mix-up. Also most people assume that any maniac running around like Jack the Ripper slaughtering other humans for no good reason has to be insane or psychotic. They say this because to them such an act seems to be so outside of normal behavior that only a crazy person would do such a thing.

Psychosis and psychopathy are too different things. I suppose there are some cases where the two conditions overlap. Some paranoid schizophrenics seem to have also been psychopaths, but this is not common.

These sociopaths are not psychotic. This is an important thing to note. Only 2% of serials are psychotic. It is fairly easy to catch a psychotic serial because they are completely insane. It’s hard for crazy people to organize a trip to the bathroom, much less a serial killing spree.

Sociopaths and psychopaths are not the tiniest bit crazy. If they were even 1% nuts, they would be easier to catch. They are almost too sane in that they don’t have to worry about emotions slipping them up. These humans are like machines. If they are serials, then they are killing machines.

I would agree though that outside of the former definition of craziness which tends to emphasize impairment, sociopaths/psychopaths are indeed crazy. They’re morally crazy. And in some ways, these are craziest humans of all because they simply lack a conscience.

Instead of being crazy, sociopaths and psychopaths are better seen as sick. Or even evil. We need to take our analysis of these folks outside of the sanity/insanity paradigm and over into the moral universe of good/evil. These people aren’t crazy. They’re just evil, that’s all. This is the only way to properly understand such people.

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Filed under California, Crime, Evil, Feminism, Gender Studies, Man World, Mental Illness, Personality Disorders, Psychology, Psychopathology, Psychotic Disorders, Regional, Serial Killers, Sick, Sociology, Sociopathy, USA, Women

by | January 12, 2017 · 6:35 PM

Is Psychiatry a Pseudoscience?

Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!: I think Mr Lindsay would do well to read Crazy Like Us if he hasn’t already.

Is psychiatry a pseudoscience?

Yes and no. That is, the phenomena of mental illness are genuine, but their investigation is sorely lacking in rigor. This added to the fact that psychiatry is a business in the US and the Anglosphere more generally results in huge over-diagnosis, pathologizing difference, etc., and children are the easiest marks for this con.

As someone who works with people who have actual diagnosed DSM disorders on a regular basis, I definitely think that a lot of these things are real, and they are indeed disorders. We actually try very hard not to pathologize anything that could remotely be seen as normal conduct, and we cast a wide net for that phrase.

The people I deal with have Axis 1 disorders, and they are suffering from the most incredible pain and misery. Many of them are almost literally living in Hell. I lost one client to suicide. Further, the disorder often makes it very hard for them to function well in society. It’s not uncommon that I have clients who have been hospitalized, sometimes on multiple occasions.

Axis 2 is real too. Those are real disorders. I have known some people on Axis 2 (personality disorders), and trust me, they are not normal in any way, shape or form. Mostly they are making other people miserable, but the disorder is usually screwing up their own life in a big way too.

As far as psychiatry being a pseudoscience, well, I get people who are misdiagnosed all the time. I’m not allowed to give legal DSM diagnoses, but I tell them my opinion on what they have and how they are misdiagnosed. Often I get people diagnosed psychotic who are not psychotic at all.

Some of them are pretty crazy, but just because you feel really nuts does not mean you are psychotic. Psychosis is a loss of touch with reality. If you are not out of touch with reality, you are not psychotic. Psychosis is grossly misdiagnosed in the US. If you feel really crazy, you get diagnosed “psychotic.” It is just the field’s way of saying “this person is seriously crazy.” But seriously crazy is not the same thing as psychotic. You would not believe how nuts people can feel without being psychotic. Your world can get seriously weirded out when you are not even psychotic at all.

I also get people who are mis-prescribed all the time. Psychiatrists hand this stuff out like candy and they severely play down the side effects.

In short, yes it’s a real science, but we don’t have formal tests like lab tests or X-rays to actually make a perfect diagnosis. So we have to go on symptoms, and it can be quite hard to diagnose a mentally ill person correctly. I have dealt with people who had been diagnosed with 10-15 different disorders. There was no way that they currently had all of those conditions when I spoke to them. This person was extremely ill though, I would agree with that. Unbelievably ill.

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Filed under Health, Medicine, Mental Illness, Personality Disorders, Psychology, Psychopathology, Psychotherapy, Psychotic Disorders, Science

by | September 26, 2016 · 9:08 PM

The Nature of Denial in Various Mental Disorders

It is very hard to accept that you have a mental illness. Even a minor one. Most people who don’t have one act like they would not accept it even if they did. I have known many people in my life with untreated and even undiagnosed issues that went on for years, if not lifetimes.

Anxiety disorders are different because they are so painful and ego-dystonic but even there a lot of folks don’t want to admit it. The fact that almost everyone has low levels of anxiety on a regular basis nowadays does not help matters and it enables you to think you are just like everyone else.

Manics are notorious for not admitting they were ill. I have known a number of them in my life and probably 50% refused to admit that they had it. It is not helpful that the manic seems quite normal to many of his friends drawn in by the overblown charm of the hypomanic. I have sat in rooms with flagrant, raving, idiotic hypomanics charming the whole room with their grandiosity. I sat there shaking my head. It’s obviously an illness. Yes, it’s possible to be too damn happy. Hypomania is a case of excessive happiness. They are so happy, they’re nuts! If you do not believe that hypomanics are crazy, spend some time around one if you get a chance. This is not normal, healthy happiness, which I actually believe that there cannot be too much of, despite society saying that being too happy is “not adult” and “acting like a child.”

Schizophrenics almost all deny that they are ill. It is a hallmark feature of the disorder. Even after they have been told countless times that they have schizophrenia, even after multiple hospitalizations, even after years on antipsychotic drugs, they still insist that they don’t have schizophrenia. This is not so much a denial mechanism as a feature of the disorder. The disorder is such that it blinds you to the fact that you even have it! This disorder feels completely real, as if this is the normal way that life is.

OK, suppose you went to classes at college yesterday. The next day you tell people that you went to college yesterday, and everyone laughs at you and says no you didn’t. And to make matters worse, says you’re crazy for thinking you went to school yesterday. What would you think.? You remember full well that you went to school the other day. You remember it loud and clear. How they can they say that some obvious thing that I clearly experienced did not happen. After a while, they start thinking it’s everyone else that’s nuts and not them.

Almost all people with personality disorders deny that they are ill, as mentioned above. Everything is everyone else’s fault, and they go through their whole lives like that.

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Filed under Anxiety Disorders, Mental Illness, Personality Disorders, Psychology, Psychopathology, Psychotic Disorders, Schizophrenia