Date: 05 Jan 97 04:31:01 EST
From: Chris Burford <100423.2040-AT-compuserve.com>
Subject: M-PSY: Violence and mental illness


Chris:
------
I was interested Ilan's post , which emphasised how traumatic it
is to have relationships break up. This made me recall how in all
previous societies this would rarely have happened to isolated 
individuals. Even if one significant other died, there would be 
the extended family or village with its claustrophobia and its 
adaptive support. Modern atomised bourgeois society where so 
much depends on the quality of the relationship with one other person,
and in which more than 50% of marriages now being contracted can
be expected to end, in countries like Britain, present hard 
psychosocial challenges of a different nature.



Ilan:
----
Usually, the so called mental illnesses are an internal chemical
sedation that protect one from the flooding emotions. (The contention
that rage and hatred feeling involved with the so called schizophrenia
was not restricted to Bloiler.)


Chris:
------

I am a little reluctant to accept this without some qualification.
In the sense that all mental processes are expressed chemically,
either by excitation or inhibition of the tendency for the next 
neurone to depolarise, I am startled to read an explanation of 
mental illness as being chemical, from a progressive psychologist such
as yourself.  The sense in which I agree with your main point is an overall
model of pathology, as very much manifesting features of self-regulation 
by the organism in response to a change in the environment. I do think there
are many features of dissociation in mental illness as in ordinary life, and
I do think that mental illnesses can often be seen as forms of decompensation
which have a psycho-social significance as well as a significance for the 
organism itself. 

Would you buy this?

I was not aware that Bleuler talked much about rage and 
hatred in schizophrenia, but your remarks stimulate me to look.

Ilan on violence:
-----------------

It is statistically proven that psychotic people are LESS physically
violent in comparison of other people in the same conditions. 


Chris:
------

This is the party line of the left and the liberal intelligentsia, 
(in which I include myself) and I fear it is not quite good enough
even though it is "true". It is as true as research in the social
sciences can establish, that *on average* people with schizophrenia
are no more violent than the rest of the population, which of course
has an appreciable level of violence especially among young men. 

The problem is that professionals IMHO cannot deny if asked by a 
perceptive public, that a subgroup of people with schizophrenia may be
*more* violent than average. (The great majority of people with schizophrenia
suffering from too much passivity.) 

The worry is that the violence to those 
around, is unpredictable. I do not think we can deny that a small proportion of 
people with schizophrenia can get a delusional system about someone else, 
can feel intensely persecuted *in a way that cannot be tested out in 
reality* and are known to get emotionally disturbed by relationships that
have "high-expressed emotion" - mainly an excess of critical remarks or of 
overinvolvement. 

The pattern of an ageing young man in his later twenties
or thirties who has not managed to form his own life, with a job, and a 
sexual partner, stuck at home with a distressed over-loving over-critical
mother, is a malign conjunction, whether you believe in Oedipus complexes 
or not. 

So even granted that violence to self is many times more likely among
sufferers from schizophrenia than violence to others, 
there is a serious social problem of management of mental illness.

That Alfred Hitchcock's clever film Psycho, strikes a chord not just in 
fantasy, but in reality.


I wonder if Ilan has a comment on the processes with the young 
soldier who tried to kill a number of Arab civilians at Hebron 
last week. It seemed politically important for the agreement to 
go ahead that an announcement could be made saying that he had a
history of psychological problems. There were then questions about
how the Israeli army comes to recruit people with "psychological 
problems". But as almost everyone has psychological problems I 
wonder whether the professionals were forced into going along 
with some sort of vague diagnosis. It seems this frontier area of 
psychology has become extremely important in many countries of the 
world.



Chris Burford
London



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