Interview on NPR Conflates Mental Illness and non-Conformist 9/11 Thinking

On the NPR show [Justice Talking] on Jan 13, 2008, host Margot Adler interviewed former Washington Post reporter and Pulitzer Prize-nominated author Pete Earley on the topic of "Treatment Laws and the Mentally Ill" also titled "The Rights of the Mentally Ill." Earley described living with a son who has bipolar disorder and who at times was "off his medication." Earley recounted the difficulties of getting law enforcement and medical resource people to help his family and his son. The story is tragic and disheartening until the end when Earley tells Adler that he can accept the craziness of his son's thinking related to 9/11. Here is the transcript of the end of the interview in Earley's voice:

"What's bad is persons with untreated mental illness who are allowed to get sicker and sicker, like my son, and we won't step in until they become violent. We need some common sense. Look, my son doesn't believe that terrorists attacked during 9/11. He thinks George Bush is behind it, okay? I don't have a problem with that. But when my son has a history of mental illness, when he's off his medication, when we know medication helps him, when he is psychotic and thinks the CIA is listening to his thoughts, and he's sitting in front of a television, and we know that he tends to become violent, why do we wait for him to cross that threshold?"

Here's the link to the show:
http://www.justicetalking.org/viewprogram.asp?progID=642

“The ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them.”- Albert Einstein

Reminds me of

black on black

That Onion piece is frickin hilarious.

Oh oh....

Reminds me of the good old Soviet Union, under the Brezhnev regime in the 60s and 70s.

With the Gulag system in bad repute thanks the heroism of Sozhenitsyn, they'd come up with a new way of dealing with dissidents. Now those who expressed "anti-Soviet" thoughts were diagnosed with mental illness, and off they went to the psychiatric "hospitals," where straitjackets and huge quantities of psychoactive drugs awaited them.

It sounds like a normal reaction to the realization that everyth

It sounds like a normal reaction to the realization that everything you are told by your govt. is false, and that the NSA is spying on you, and that the television is an instrument for dissemination of non-stop propaganda to make you stupid.

I'd give Earley a wide berth as a parent as well as truthsayer

He has shown up on my radar before, and my radar takes no prisoners.

See HL BFN 20-Apr-2007

Remember, bipolar is the neveaux moniker for "obsessive-compulsive disorder", which is being fronted as a catch-all diagnosis for many behaviors that might merely result from a lack of empathy or true understanding of someone's state of mind. As schizophrenia had been for years, before it was disambiguated into several other clinical terms.

And here we have a man who has actually stated,

"I took him home and for the next forty eight hours I watched him sink into this mental abyss. At one point he had tin foil wrapped around his head and he was watching TV because he thought the CIA was trying to penetrate his thoughts through the airwaves."

"So I went in and I lied. I said, My son has threatened to kill me. That got him in the hospital..."

(link above) Is one led to believe FOR A MINUTE that this man's son actually wrapped aluminum foil around his head, in front of a television set (not even a computer??). Notice how the CIA appears in the same sentance. This is pure cliché. Kitsch.

OR would one be more inclined to wonder if this man, who continues to tell his son's story in the news, is himself a candidate for Munchausen's By Proxy. At his age, the CIA+tinfoil hat meme, which was quaint cliché twenty years ago... the situation more likely stems from a fantasy originating in his own mind than that of his son's.