Are Conservatives Mentally Ill?

Now, Religion in the News, a report and comment on religious trends and events being covered by the media.This week’s item is from Elaine’s Newsletter.com, with a headline:“The American Subversives.”The following are excerpts:“In 2003, a study was published in the Psychological Bulletin.That’s the same fine American Psychological Association Publication that brought you the Rind et al Study that said that childhood sexual abuse was not always harmful, and was even sometimes beneficial.This 2003 study concluded that political conservatives are mentally ill.That’s right.Conservatives are deranged due to mental rigidity and closed mindedness, including increased dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity, decreased cognitive complexity, decreased openness to experience, uncertainty avoidance, personal needs for order and structure, and need for cognitive closure, lowered self-esteem, fear, anger and aggression, pessimism, disgust and contempt.Yep, that about sizes up my state of mind, especially that part about pessimism, disgust and contempt.As far as lowered self-esteem is concerned, when all the things that provide stability and a foundation for living are deemed pathological and common sense is derided as an illness, and all your best efforts to persuade those who call evil virtue and virtue evil fall on deaf ears.I suppose it is bound to make you a little crazy.”

Tom:

Dave, this is obviously an editorial, but the reason I wanted to talk about this is that it really lays out so many of the problems that we’ve been talking about in these programs--like last week we talked about a child at school reading the Bible on her own.Now through psychology and through other means, all you need to do is go to things such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, so-called.You’ll find items in there that are irrational, but they have titles that are enumerated here.What does it mean, “decreased cognitive complexity”, “decreased openness to experience”, “uncertainty avoidance.” This is psychobabble, yet those who are conservative, those who certainly take a world view, and so on, these are all categories that they throw us into, and then, like this child who is a middle schooler, who is reading the Bible at lunch time.Oh, no, this can’t be, because certainly the things in the Bible are going to repress, certainly an openness to doing things in life that help growth.Just like it says here, sometimes childhood sexual abuse is not always harmful.

Dave:

Well Tom, there’s an obvious problem here.Someone is defining what they say is sanity and insanity, and that’s the psychological--what would we call them?

Tom:

So called experts, and how we are to live our lives.

Dave:

Psychological community.Now, who gave them the right to define this?But Tom, they can’t even define it, as you pointed out, the DSM.I can remember when I was a boy we visited a place that was called Patton, I remember that, in San Bernardino, as I recall.We lived at Riverside, California, and it was an insane asylum.In those days you were either crazy or you were not crazy, and you could pretty well tell who was crazy and who wasn’t.But then they keep adding things and adding things, and you know, this progressed to where we’re got several hundreds now of these things.

Tom:

It started out the DSM in the 50’s, it was like 154 mental disorders, today there are 370 or more.

Dave:

Yeah, but I’m talking about even before the 154.There was really only one way back there in the beginning.I remember sitting next to a woman psychologist, unless she was a psychiatrist, she had just come from a convention of the Psychological Association, I think it was.And she was a little bit hot because, she says:They’ve added some more categories now and I’ve got to get a new book, and they charge you an arm and a leg for that thing.

Tom:

But it’s also the open to getting the insurance companies to pay for this.

Dave:

Right.So Tom, they make it up as they go along.It’s total nonsense, and that’s what this is about.So they come up with these categories, and these definitions of things, and actually what they are doing is they are excusing sin.

Tom:

Yes.

Dave:

Because it’s not sin anymore, no, we put a label on it.Oh, I used to think that I just had a temper, but now they tell me--they’ve got a name for it, and you get insurance money if you’re treated for it.It’s a scam, and yet the government and the public, and tragically as you pointed out, the church goes right along with this.

Tom:

Well Dave, my concern is, and I sort of go back to what you just mentioned earlier.You visited an insane asylum, my father was a psychiatrist, and I grew up in that community, lived on the grounds of an insane asylum.So, I have great compassion for people who have problems of living, but now, every issue of life is a psychiatric or psychological problem, and it’s this new priesthood that is telling us what we need to do.Now, just go down the list:Freud, Jung, Maslow, Rogers, look at their lives.I encourage anybody who thinks these men are the pillars of how we can change society for the better, look at their lives.I mean, they are disastrous, absolutely disastrous.Freud’s concepts that has influenced the world were all based on his own perversions.

Dave:

Right.Tom, you remember the case in California where a number of psychologists, actually from Stanford, got themselves admitted to psychiatric hospitals across California.They were not loony at all, and the patients knew that these guys were not crazy, but then they couldn’t get themselves out, because the psychiatrists insisted, Oh, no, they were!So, that made a little publicity, and there was a psychiatric hospital in California that said, You couldn’t have fooled us.And the guy said, Okay, over the next six months we’ll send in an unspecified number of these phonies, and it threw that hospital into turmoil.Well, is this one?No, I don’t think that.And finally, at the end of the six months they said:Well, we have identified 20 of them, tell me, how many did you send?We didn’t send any!Tom, this is a joke, they can’t even follow their own definitions.

Tom:

Well, it’s a tragedy, Dave, it really is, and sadly, the church is into it.