Aurora Shooter and Mental Health Issues

[midtennchip]

Maybe someone posted this already, but I didn't see. Anyway, it looks like Holmes received a significant amount of grant money to attend his PhD program. That isn't the interesting part, though. Read the comments from the Dean of the school.

http://bobagard.blogspot.com/2012/07/getting-it-wrong_24.html

Evidently, these training psychology professors are "very much on contact" with these students who receive these grants, but they were totally incapable of identifying Holmes's problems. Doesn't speak too well to the capabilities of these folks. But these are the very types of folks who think they know who should and shouldn't have guns. As the author states, "good job, Medical School faculty."

[tnhawk]

I've always thought most of the psychology students and professors were disturbed people, trying to understand themselves. Those I've known, were clearly not normal. Glad I only took enough hours to meet the school requirements!

[Jonnin]

I have a hard time taking psych degrees, professors, "doctors", etc seriously at all. I have yet to see anyone who was cured of mental illness. I have seen countless kids and adults harmed by these folks though. Keep them away from me.

[daddyo]

Wow, hard to wriggle out of that one....

[Guest drv2fst]

psychology is just paying someone to listen to you. If you have friends good enough to do that then you don't need the shrinks. If you don't have those friends, then a shrink is a substitute friend. Ultimately, you have to solve your own problems in either case. Neither your friend or your shrink is going to do it for you.

[Guest Old goat]

Eunice Kennedy Schriver, why does that name ring a bell?

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Well re behavior sciences it is useful to keep the players straight. They ain't all the same. Broadly split between academic research vs clinical vs "applied psychology".

Research-- Human (or animal) behavior is complicated enough to be tough to make progress in understanding, but I don't see that research into "mind" "perception" "emotions" "behavior" would be considered any more useless or silly than the study of astrophysics. Even if research is currently at a relatively crude state and progress may be slow, you won't advance without research. Certainly we can't generally cure schizophrenia, but along the same lines we can't change even the tiniest sunspot. The utility argument would fail on both fields. "If you can't even modulate the sun, and you don't even expect to do so in the forseeable future, then it is stupid to do astrophysics. What use is it?"

Now if Holmes had been surrounded daily by clinical psychologists or psychiatrists, I frankly doubt that he would have been detected. The army psychatrists didn't detect that muslim nut psychiatrist. But Holmes was in neuroscience. They cut up rat brains and map sensory paths in cats and such. The same nerds you find studying the pancreas or the eye. They tend to be an "odd bunch" compared to the man on the street but not greatly gifted with psychological insight. Perhaps the reverse is true. They pay attention to their own little problem to solve. From what I've seen, the psychobiology specialists tend to consider clinical psychology as silly superstition. They work in the lab and most often with animals.

Clinical-- Which is further split between medical and non-medical. Sometimes they can kinda sorta make things better. Dunno if it is better now than back in the 1970's when I messed with it some. It would have to be incrementally better though many problems remain incurable. When I was working in it, I don't want to exaggerate, as it wasn't "as bad as it sounds" but the psycologists tended to consider psychiatrists unscientific witch doctors and it is likely the psychiatrists had similar opinion of the non-medical folk. Dunno if that attitude has persisted to modern times. It wasn't "extreme" split but those attitudes did exist. They worked side-by-side daily and didn't explain their beefs to each other that I know of. I never saw a clinical psychologist dressing down a psychiatrist for being an unscientific idiot or vice-versa. It might spoil the working relationship since they have to work together into the future.

Many things in the past which were untreatable mental disease, have been identified as symptoms of physical disease, and by treating the physical disease the mental problems clear. So there are people who are not crazy today who would have been incurably crazy 100 years ago. Anti-psychotic pills don't cure severely mentally ill whom we can't yet find physical disease mechanisms, but sometimes seem to make the best of a bad situation. Would you rather have a bunch of medicated crazy people who are relatively passive and easy to care for, or would you rather have a bunch of unmedicated crazy people chained in dungeons? Yer gonna have a bunch of crazy people to handle some way or the other, regardless what you do with them.

I suppose it is possible that some kinds of counseling might do more good than bad but would not bet my own money on it. It seems true that many treatments are ineffective or sometimes counter-productive. Perhaps some treatments work. Dunno. Maybe in the future it will incrementally improve. A lot of clinical folk do seem "a little odder than the typical man on the street". On the other hand the typical man on the street would NEVER make a career of being around crazy people all day. So maybe by necessity the clinical folk are "a little odder than usual" or they would say to hell with it and go get a job driving a truck or whatever. A fella smart enough to be a psychiatrist could just as easily be a proctologist. But you have to wonder about those proctology dudes as well.

Applied Psych-- Many applications where perhaps it isn't as exact as engineering a bridge that won't fall down, but perhaps worth what it costs. For instance, if it costs a company $20,000 per employee in initial training. Every new hire that can't cut the mustard costs big bucks. A psychologist might not have 100 percent success selecting people most likely to succeed training, but he doesn't have to improve the ratio of successful hires very much in order to pay his salary. There are so many basic mundane thangs like that, which are also encompassed in the field of psych.

[Guest zort]

wow that was long

[Oh Shoot]

wow that was long...

Just a heads up, TGO's CoC does not require you to slog through any given post.

- OS

[BBill_TN]

Just a heads up, TGO's CoC does not require you to slog through any given post.

- OS

OS, you just saved me a lot of time...I always thought I had to read everything on here:)

On a side note...how many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?

...

Only one but the bulb has to want to change. )

[DaveTN]

So what if he had “issues†there isn’t anything that can be done about it.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

So what if he had “issues†there isn’t anything that can be done about it.

Yep so many people have issues, that issues are not useful for prediction except in real obvious cases. You can always find issues in hindsight but there are all those other people with even worse problems who live their entire lives without killing anybody.

[R_Bert]

Well re behavior sciences it is useful to keep the players straight. They ain't all the same. Broadly split between academic research vs clinical vs "applied psychology".

Research--

Clinical--

Applied Psych-- .

And then there are my personal favorites -

Navel Gazing, and Delusions of Grandeur

[Guest 6.8 AR]

I have a hard time taking psych degrees, professors, "doctors", etc seriously at all. I have yet to see anyone who was cured of mental illness. I have seen countless kids and adults harmed by these folks though. Keep them away from me.

Gotta agree with that.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

I have a hard time taking psych degrees, professors, "doctors", etc seriously at all. I have yet to see anyone who was cured of mental illness. I have seen countless kids and adults harmed by these folks though. Keep them away from me.

Its hopeless to argue, but is study of the brain less serious than study of the heart, pancreas, or kidneys? Or are those also not to be taken seriously?

[TMF]

The army psychatrists didn't detect that muslim nut psychiatrist.

Not to sharpshoot ya there Lester, but they actually did, multiple times. It was political correctness that overrode any action. Yes, political correctness is actually killing people.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Not to sharpshoot ya there Lester, but they actually did, multiple times. It was political correctness that overrode any action. Yes, political correctness is actually killing people.

Thanks for the correction TMF. You probably followed the details closer than me. It seemed easy to imagine it not caught at all. Most patients in mental hospitals are much more dysfunctional than in the movies (and not near as good looking) but as Jonnin earlier noted, many mental health professionals do tend to be "odd ducks". Not near as odd as the patients since they are generally able to function in the real world and the patients ain't so good at that. But the mental health workers can be rather eccentric. I've seen a couple of psychiatrists that were not mad as a hatter but close. The "bounds of normalcy" are kinda loose. Hassan passing "within the loose bounds of normalcy" would be easy to imagine.

Basically what I was getting at on this thread is that the Holmes guy was amongst neuro researchers, microscope, test tube and oscilloscope people. Not clinical psychologists or psychiatrists. You wouldn't expect those profs to be any better or worse at detecting a mental flaw than a math or engineering professor. Not that I think a psychiatrist would be especially likely to detect it "outside of normal bounds". But faulting microscope and test tube guys for not being good at psychology because they missed incipient breakdown, is kinda missing the point. Ain't saying the clinical folk would have caught it, but this Holmes joker's profs were not even clinical folks. Admittedly our current expertise in practical mental health is damn primitive. It is just that if it could be better at the moment it would be better, and the clinical folk are only a small part of the field.

One article (can't find it at the moment, but didn't want to imply I thunk this up) brought up the good point that the local gun club was better at detecting a dangerous nut than were the test tube guys.

[TMF]

One article (can't find it at the moment, but didn't want to imply I thunk this up) brought up the good point that the local gun club was better at detecting a dangerous nut than were the test tube guys.

Ha, yeah I find that to be kinda ironic considering the circumstances here and the backlash towards the gun industry. I agree that his fellow students and professors might not have picked up on his mental issues. Even if they did I'm not sure how it would change the outcome here. Sometimes people just go crazy and there's nothing you can do about it.

I've come across many a mental case in my day and can only think of two that caused me to interject and take action, and that was only because I was in the military at the time and the mental cases had plenty of access to arms and ammo. When I worked in other jobs I don't think I would have cared to involve myself in a person's personal/mental issues. I'm sure I've come across them, just can't think of any right now. Mainly because it's not my business, and also because I don't know how my involvement would "improve" anything or even what my goal of involving myself would be. From the perspective of fellow students and professors I can understand an unwillingness to do anything about a character that acts a little "off". Add to that your observation that being "off" is not an uncommon trait amongst those attracted to such a profession.

Context, I believe, is what motivates people to become involved or at least draw attention to a situation. In this case you had the owner of a gun range that Holmes applied to become a member of being immediately suspicious of his behavior just based on the Holmes' voicemail causing him to alert his staff. Not a big deal to call someone back and get a creepy voicemail, but in the context of joining a gun range it may set off some alarm bells. Another example would be that sorry POS traitor from Ft. Campbell that planned on setting off bombs targeted at Soldiers in the Ft. Hood area. I'm sure this guy acted like a fruitcake everywhere he went, but acting like a fruitcake in a gun shop while trying to purchase large amounts of smokeless powder is what got him rolled up after the store owner called the cops. It's all about context. I see fruitcakes all the time. There is a guy that walks down Riverside Drive here everyday in camo pants, no shirt and yells at himself as he walks down the road. That doesn't stand out as something which would make me alert the authorities. Now, if he was doing the same thing and carrying a Draco with the tip painted orange.... well, you know how that goes.

[Jonnin]

Its hopeless to argue, but is study of the brain less serious than study of the heart, pancreas, or kidneys? Or are those also not to be taken seriously?

Study the brain all you want. Study is great, very important. However their ability to treat anything more serious than depression has an abysmal track record and their ability to influence things (councilors at high schools, for example) is too strong. I guess it comes down to trust, and I do not trust them.

Prove me wrong. Send your best white suit over to cure the Colorado shooter so he can return to a normal life unsupervised OR show that he is not insane and is just a mean SOB that is perfectly normal.

[daddyo]

My dad practiced general medicine for 40 years. He knew quite a few psychiatrists and his observation was that many of them were just as crazy if not crazier than their patients.

Edited July 27, 2012 by DaddyO

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Ha, yeah I find that to be kinda ironic considering the circumstances here and the backlash towards the gun industry. I agree that his fellow students and professors might not have picked up on his mental issues. Even if they did I'm not sure how it would change the outcome here. Sometimes people just go crazy and there's nothing you can do about it.

...

Context, I believe, is what motivates people to become involved or at least draw attention to a situation. In this case you had the owner of a gun range that Holmes applied to become a member of being immediately suspicious of his behavior just based on the Holmes' voicemail causing him to alert his staff. Not a big deal to call someone back and get a creepy voicemail, but in the context of joining a gun range it may set off some alarm bells. Another example would be that sorry POS traitor from Ft. Campbell that planned on setting off bombs targeted at Soldiers in the Ft. Hood area. I'm sure this guy acted like a fruitcake everywhere he went, but acting like a fruitcake in a gun shop while trying to purchase large amounts of smokeless powder is what got him rolled up after the store owner called the cops. It's all about context. I see fruitcakes all the time. There is a guy that walks down Riverside Drive here everyday in camo pants, no shirt and yells at himself as he walks down the road. That doesn't stand out as something which would make me alert the authorities. Now, if he was doing the same thing and carrying a Draco with the tip painted orange.... well, you know how that goes.

Thanks TMF. That is an astute analysis.

My dad practiced general medicine for 40 years. He knew quite a few psychiatrists and his observation was that many of them were just as crazy if not crazier than their patients.

Hi DaddyO

No argument from me. Some mental health professionals can be odd ducks. Some of the practices might specialize in "slightly odder ducks". People who have problems but they still get up and go to work everyday, etc. Some of those patients might be wasting their money going to the psychiatrist, but it is the patient's own money to spend. Usually insurance doesn't pay much on mental treatments. IMO insurance shouldn't pay much unless treatments are scientifically proven effective.

However the core crazies are lots odder than a psychiatrist. Assuming the psychiatrist is functional enough to go to work, pay bills, feed himself, etc. The core crazies can't do that stuff. At all. It is sad how non-functional they are.

And therein lies the problem. Regardless how ineffective our treatments for severe mental illnesses, a sizeable percentage of our population gets them. So a smart engineer or computer programmer can scoff all he wants, but if wife, parents or a kid happens to get real sick, then knock yerself out! If the mental health professionals are so stupid and doofus, then you cure yer kid yerself!

Later on after that don't work too good, you will go the the professionals. And the odds are, in many kinds of problems, the improvement might be modest or nil. But just because the professionals ain't real effective doesn't automatically mean the mental health worker is doofus. Some brilliant hard-headed engineer out there will become fabulously wealthy if he can cure what those mental health workers are too stupid and crazy to cure. Step up to the plate and fix it, show how dumb psychiatrists are, and get richer than Bill Gates!

(I'm not ranting at you, DaddyO. It is just a generic geezer rant.)

Edited July 27, 2012 by Lester Weevils

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Study the brain all you want. Study is great, very important. However their ability to treat anything more serious than depression has an abysmal track record and their ability to influence things (councilors at high schools, for example) is too strong. I guess it comes down to trust, and I do not trust them.

Prove me wrong. Send your best white suit over to cure the Colorado shooter so he can return to a normal life unsupervised OR show that he is not insane and is just a mean SOB that is perfectly normal.

Thanks Jonnin

Yep, I agree that there are many things wrong with people's noggins we can't fix. When I was studying psych was most interested in the neurology "nuts and bolts". Later on I worked around the clinical a bit but the results seemed discouraging. Studied more re evaluative research of treatment programs, the problem of determining what does and doesn't work, but after awhile it wasn't interesting enough to persue.

Was studying some over the last year about counseling as practiced today, and there are several methods I don't recall being taught back in the day. Having not had experience with those methods, can't say one way or t'other whether they work any better than earlier methods. There are some research claims that some of the methods are better than placebo, but I'll reserve judgement. You could have a treatment that works LOTS better than placebo and still have a 50 percent failure rate. So if your friend or relative happens to be one of the half who didn't get better then it would look pretty useless. OTOH if the friend or relative got better you would be happy. Some patients get better regardless what you do, and some get worse regardless what you do. It is difficult (not impossible) to measure.

Edit-- I basically agree with you on the effectiveness of counseling, but I keep an open mind about the many things of which I'm ignorant. I'd have to get desperate indeed to pay money for somebody to give me psychotherapy.

It is easy to "take for granted" earlier advances. There are MANY physical illnesses that would have been diagnosed incurable mental illness in the past. Somebody who would have been crazy because of a thyroid condition, garun-dam-tee ya that guy was "cured" along with treatment of the thyroid condition. Just sayin, some older mental illnesses have been cured, so just because there are some who can't yet be cured is looking at a half-empty glass. What was once a "mental illness" became a "physical illness" and therefore it is no longer counted in the tally of cured mental illnesses.

Psych stuff I find most interesting has to do with neural networks. Ferinstance there is real interesting stuff regarding the low-level nuts and bolts how the brain perceives audio or vision. Techniques you could steal from nature and implement in computer code or hardware. And all the biochem stuff going on in the noggin. That is psychology that has nothing to do with a patient laying on the couch describing the dream he had last night.

Bro in law and sis are both industrial psychologists. Bro-in-law specialized in running industrial training for large organizations, and sis works personnel management and got to be a high muck-a-muck in personnel at a big corporation, though the last few years it is working overtime on database design, not very "psychological". Just sayin, general complaints about "psychology" just because we can't cure schizophrenia, seems to unfairly smear a lot of psychologists who are earning their keep quite nicely.

Edited July 27, 2012 by Lester Weevils

[TGO David]

I see fruitcakes all the time. There is a guy that walks down Riverside Drive here everyday in camo pants, no shirt and yells at himself as he walks down the road. That doesn't stand out as something which would make me alert the authorities. Now, if he was doing the same thing and carrying a Draco with the tip painted orange.... well, you know how that goes.

[Guest 6.8 AR]

Thanks Jonnin

Yep, I agree that there are many things wrong with people's noggins we can't fix. When I was studying psych was most interested in the neurology "nuts and bolts". Later on I worked around the clinical a bit but the results seemed discouraging. Studied more re evaluative research of treatment programs, the problem of determining what does and doesn't work, but after awhile it wasn't interesting enough to persue.

Was studying some over the last year about counseling as practiced today, and there are several methods I don't recall being taught back in the day. Having not had experience with those methods, can't say one way or t'other whether they work any better than earlier methods. There are some research claims that some of the methods are better than placebo, but I'll reserve judgement. You could have a treatment that works LOTS better than placebo and still have a 50 percent failure rate. So if your friend or relative happens to be one of the half who didn't get better then it would look pretty useless. OTOH if the friend or relative got better you would be happy. Some patients get better regardless what you do, and some get worse regardless what you do. It is difficult (not impossible) to measure.

Edit-- I basically agree with you on the effectiveness of counseling, but I keep an open mind about the many things of which I'm ignorant. I'd have to get desperate indeed to pay money for somebody to give me psychotherapy.

It is easy to "take for granted" earlier advances. There are MANY physical illnesses that would have been diagnosed incurable mental illness in the past. Somebody who would have been crazy because of a thyroid condition, garun-dam-tee ya that guy was "cured" along with treatment of the thyroid condition. Just sayin, some older mental illnesses have been cured, so just because there are some who can't yet be cured is looking at a half-empty glass. What was once a "mental illness" became a "physical illness" and therefore it is no longer counted in the tally of cured mental illnesses.

Psych stuff I find most interesting has to do with neural networks. Ferinstance there is real interesting stuff regarding the low-level nuts and bolts how the brain perceives audio or vision. Techniques you could steal from nature and implement in computer code or hardware. And all the biochem stuff going on in the noggin. That is psychology that has nothing to do with a patient laying on the couch describing the dream he had last night.

Bro in law and sis are both industrial psychologists. Bro-in-law specialized in running industrial training for large organizations, and sis works personnel management and got to be a high muck-a-muck in personnel at a big corporation, though the last few years it is working overtime on database design, not very "psychological". Just sayin, general complaints about "psychology" just because we can't cure schizophrenia, seems to unfairly smear a lot of psychologists who are earning their keep quite nicely.

Hey Lester,

It's probably unfair to dump all the related 'ologies in there with neuroscientific research. There are good and bad in

every field of study. I know so much about it my head is hurting. j/k "Something snapped" or some kind of manic-

depressive episode or some other kind of gobbledy-gook is usually said about these types of criminals and, on occasion,

some Doc will let it slip that "this person was just plain evil". Someone will definitely come up with figuring out what happened by the year 2525, or not.

Frankenstein was let out for a stroll to the theater and was wired wrongly. We will never know otherwise. Crazy, it fits.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Hey Lester,

It's probably unfair to dump all the related 'ologies in there with neuroscientific research. There are good and bad in

every field of study. I know so much about it my head is hurting. j/k "Something snapped" or some kind of manic-

depressive episode or some other kind of gobbledy-gook is usually said about these types of criminals and, on occasion,

some Doc will let it slip that "this person was just plain evil". Someone will definitely come up with figuring out what happened by the year 2525, or not.

Frankenstein was let out for a stroll to the theater and was wired wrongly. We will never know otherwise. Crazy, it fits.

Hi 6.8

Yep often "crazy" is about as scientific as one needs to get. There is probably room for the occasional scientific diagnosis of "evil". I suffer "incurable chronic orneryness". Or maybe they will invent a pill for that.

It could be an incomplete or entirely wrong view, but since the 1970's I've seen it as hardware versus software. If a computer is in perfect working order it will still malfunction with buggy software. If a computer is partially broken then IN SOME CASES, TO A CERTAIN EXTENT, you could work around a hardware defect with software patches. Though in other cases the computer is so stewed that no possible software can fix what's wrong. There are even cases where software will actually break the hardware. The old Commodore PET computer had a "halt and catch fire" instruction-- A hardware bug where a certain accidental sequence of instructions would fry the dang thing. You can do the same on some modern computers for instance by messing up the sleep/cooling low level code on poorly-ventilated laptops.

So anyway, my hunch (nobody has definitively proved it, though suspected for at least 50 years)-- Serious mental illnesses, various psychoses, are hardware defects we can't yet identify or fix. It is also possible that minor problems such as chronic orneryness are also hardware defects.

But just as with a computer, bad software will cause the noggin to malfunction even if you fix the hardware defects. So even if we can eventually identify and fix whatever low-level bio-chemical defects cause schizophrenia, catatonia, depression, and orneryness-- That will be fantastic and relieve much human misery, but there will remain malfunctions due to software bugs.

Unless some better way is discovered to correct human software errors, it will most likely be the process of a programmer (therapist) talking to a device (patient) in attempt to help the device (patient) correct the software bugs. Which up til now hasn't shown excellent efficacy, but perhaps it would work better if we can repair all the hardware defects.

As machines become more intelligent, eventually programming computers will become more like counseling than programming. "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" "Sorry Dave, I can't do that."... Hmmm, Hal was also afflicted with chronic orneryness!

Edited July 27, 2012 by Lester Weevils