By Dr. Jeffrey A. Schaler

I’m writing as a concerned citizen, psychologist, and psychoanalyst. President Trump’s behavior is far from that caused by a mythical mental illness, and I believe it is a mistake to diagnose him with one. For one thing, if he is considered sick, and his criminal activity is seen as the result of a mental illness, we must diminish the extent to which we hold him responsible for his criminal behavior—in other words, we must exculpate him.

As my late friend and colleague professor Thomas Szasz showed ever since he wrote his classic book The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1961), mental illness cannot exist. One thing Trump and his harshest critics share is they all believe in the myth of mental illness. Trump calls his critics “sick.” Trump’s critics say that Trump is mentally ill.

Behavior and disease are very different from one another. President Trump is metaphorically sick, not literally sick. He is not “mad,” he is “bad.” He is not sick, he is immature. This is obvious from the way he insists on avoiding responsibility for his behavior. His sycophants, like Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, and others, always blame Democrats and especially former President Biden for mistakes they make. They learned this behavior from Mr. Trump.

While this appears to be a form of psychological/emotional regression, there is no reason to think that Trump, Hegseth, and Bondi have regressed from an adult or mature stage of psychological development. I believe they never progressed from an earlier childhood stage of development into a more mature one. Trump has not regressed to an early stage of moral development. If that were the case, we might have noticed how mature he was at some earlier stage of his development. I have never seen him act mature.

Using medical-sounding terms like “malignant narcissism” serves only to stigmatize those with serious problems in living—for example, those struggling to function with true neurological diseases. Diagnosing Trump with a nonexistent mental illness ultimately serves only to remove responsibility for his bad behavior, which is exactly why he acts so strategically—to avoid taking responsibility for his behavior. Every time Trump, Hegseth, and his other sycophants blame former President Biden, they are reinforcing an avoidance of personal responsibility.

Trump loves to blame others for his bad behavior. That is what children love to do. And that is how he acts and stays like a child.

Jeffrey A. Schaler, PhD

Pompton Plains, NJ

The writer is a psychologist who received his doctorate in human development.

Home address:

116 Hillside Crossing, Pompton Plains, NJ. 07444

Cell/text: 240.460.0987

Note: Please feel free to share this article provided you list my name as author. Please include the address of my substack, Dr.JeffreyaSchaler.substack.com.

See the article below, which is my response to the outrageous article in The Baltimore Sun by my former colleague, professor emeritus of speech and communication at Towson University (Maryland), and former Szaszian, Rick Vatz, and Mike Gimbel, some kind of former Maryland drug czar, aka dope, dated January 15, 2026. What is newsworthy is who Vatz is or better, who he has pretended to be, and the arguments he has allegedly defended and stood for. Gimbel has always been a jackass. Rick unfortunately has put on an act as if he agreed with Tom and me for years. In my opinion, Vatz is a spectacular liar.

The opinion editor of the Baltimore Sun, Philip Coldwell, refused to publish my response to Gimbel and Vatz. This is undoubtedly because the owner of The Baltimore Sun, Armstrong Williams, ordered him not to publish it. I now realize Coldwell is simply a lackey for Williams.

As soon as Williams and Sinclair bought The Baltimore Sun, in Summer 2024, they fired the terrific independent editorial cartoonist, “KAL”. Williams and Sinclair have now ruined the Baltimore Sun. I have subscribed and contributed to The Sun since the 1980s. I am sad to see it go down the sewer. It used to be a good and important newspaper.

Richard Vatz was a co-author and friend, fellow Szaszian, who has gone in the opposite direction from everything we not only wrote together but also from what Rick learned from Tom Szasz about psychiatry. In this piece that I am responding to, Vatz and Gimbel are arguing that marijuana prohibition should be reinstated in Maryland.

Vatz also voted for Donald Trump and continues to support Trump’s policies. It is unbelievable to me and I can hear Tom rolling over in his grave.

Schaler response to Gimbel and Vatz is immediately below the reproduction of their article. See also New York Times reverses on marijuana, admits legalization brought worse outcomes, Feb 13, 2026. Apparently using marijuana is worse than throwing people in jail, what was done prior to repeal. I doubt prohibition will be reinstated. Keep track of those who want it prohibited again.

JAS

Why Trump’s marijuana reclassification is a mistake | GUEST COMMENTARY

By Mike Gimbel and Richard E. Vatz

PUBLISHED: January 15, 2026 at 1:58 PM EST

President Donald Trump last month ordered that marijuana be reclassified as a less dangerous drug under federal law. As Aaron E. Carroll put it in the New York Times, “The move would make it easier to conduct medical research on the drug, though it would stop short of federal legalization.”

No one had doubted that legalization is exactly where the country’s stance on marijuana usage has been headed for years now. The president claims his newfound support for the medical use of marijuana is based on science. New studies, however, clearly show that medical marijuana is not nearly as effective as the pro-marijuana lobby heralds.

And how does the president justify attacking drug-running boats to reduce drug supply and then making marijuana more acceptable? The majority of hardcore addicts began with marijuana. All Trump did was to make today’s stronger marijuana more easily available to kids and adults. This was a big mistake and will hurt more people than it helps.

An important effect of reclassification is that it will allow pot dispensaries to be able to access banks, credit card companies and not have to take only cash. This may be a major reason why Trump made the move, making the legal sellers more money and making it easier for users to shop at dispensaries (which are not doing that well, partly since many states, including Maryland, will let you grow your own).

It’s more of a message that marijuana is not that dangerous, thus reinforcing what our teens already believe.

There is no compelling evidence of general medical benefits resulting from the use of marijuana, save the self-fulfilling prophecy of self-reports of users. “There are some legitimate purposes for these compounds,” JAMA’s Dr. Kevin Hill, who directs the Division of Addiction Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, told the New York Times. “And there’s a whole other group of people who are saying they’re using it medically, but they’re really not. They’re just rationalizing their recreational use.”

Let’s look at some of the major components of the fallacious arguments in favor of legalization:

1. Marijuana has only minor and temporary medical effects. The marijuana of today is so much stronger than ever before, making it dangerous to drive or perform other significant tasks while under the influence.

2. Marijuana is not a gateway drug. Pro-legalization forces point out some people they know who use marijuana and never advance to stronger drugs. There are such people, but if you ask a hardcore addict their first illegal drug of choice, he or she will almost invariably answer “pot!” True, you can argue that is not always the case, but one can’t discount that seeking marijuana puts people in the drug sociology wherein “What’s next?” is not seen as a radical question, and those around the new user can help that person climb to more serious drugs. And for one of us who used to be in that sociology, if you like getting high, you usually want to get higher.

3. Marijuana offers significant health benefits. The pro-legalization lobby has been too successful in convincing the public and now Trump that the medical use of marijuana has medical advantages and should be easier to obtain. The newest studies are saying that medical use is not as helpful as previously promoted, but the legal proponents got what they always wanted: legalization. In addition, Alex Berenson, a former writer for the New York Times and longtime opponent of the legalization of marijuana, points out that since legalization in several states, such as Colorado, there has been a major increase in fatal accidents, heart attacks and strokes, as well as profound effects on cognitive ability, including schizophrenia, especially in teenagers, and particularly with cannabis’ increase in potency.

We’ll concede one point to the liberal objectors: Life may be tougher now than it has been in past decades. Even at our advanced age, we recall the difficulties young Americans experience. But there is no reason to make everything more difficult through the easy and legal acquisition and use of a dangerous, more potent drug linked to criminal and irresponsible behavior such as marijuana.

Mike Gimbel (mmgimbel@comcast.net) is the former drug czar for Baltimore County and has been the host of “Straight Talk,” an educational program about addiction and recovery. Richard E. Vatz (rvatz@towson.edu) is professor emeritus at Towson University and author of “The Only Authentic Book of Persuasion: The Agenda-Spin Model.” See my review of Vatz’s book in Current Psychology I will try to find and post it.

--------------------------------------------

The response to Gimbel and Vatz by Schaler that the Baltimore Sun refuses to publish:

Gimbel and Vatz wrote one of the most uninformed pieces on marijuana I have ever read!, (“Why Trump’s marijuana reclassification is a mistake,” January 15.

They assert that “the majority of hardcore addicts began with marijuana.” Well, they also likely started with mother’s milk. Does that mean we should outlaw breast feeding?

Then they assert that “all Trump did was to make today’s stronger marijuana more easily available to kids and adults.” Why shouldn’t stronger marijuana be more easily available to anyone who wants it? If that is what people want, who are Gimbel and Vatz to decide they are not entitled?

People use marijuana for the same reason people believe in God, and engage in diverse religious practices. However, religious belief and practices have contributed to far more harm to self and others than any form of drug use or abuse, legal and illegal.

As my late close friend and colleague professor emeritus of psychiatry Thomas Szasz wrote in his books entitled Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers, Revised Edition (2003); Our Right to Drugs: The Case for a Free Market (1992); and Pharmacracy (2001), all published by Syracuse University Press, works praised for their crystal clear thinking and humanitarian approach to drug policy; and my own book entitled Addiction is a Choice (2000) also praised throughout the world for exposing and destroying popular myths about addiction, for example, that addiction is a treatable “disease,” have all changed the way people think about drugs, the meaning of addiction and drug policy forever in the future. In fact, Vatz praised my book years ago!

Gimbel and Vatz apparently want to take us back into the past, to prehistoric times. They want more doctors depriving more people of freedom and responsibility in the name of protecting them from themselves. That is the hallmark of a paternalistic therapeutic state, where medicine and government are entangled in much the same way church and state once were, a theocratic state.

Who benefits from increased prohibition? As Szasz was fond of saying, cui bono? Prison builders! Law enforcement! Treatment providers!

We do not need paternalists such as Gimbel and Vatz to dictate who is entitled to which drugs and for what reason. If history has shown us anything, it is that prohibition, since the days of alcohol prohibition, causes far more harm to citizens than repeal.

Jeffrey A. Schaler, a psychologist, was appointed to the Montgomery County Drug Abuse Advisory Council to represent the mental health profession from 1982 to 1988. As elected chairman of that council, he proposed the repeal of drug prohibition in 1988. His doctoral work at the University of Maryland College Park was focused on addiction and social policy. Schaler created the Addiction Belief Scale in 1988. It is currently used by experts on drug policy throughout the world, most recently in communist China and Sweden. His work with the late Thomas Szasz on humanitarian psychiatry is now used with soldiers in Ukraine, struggling with depression and PTSD. Schaler currently lives in Pompton Plains, NJ, where he gives talks via the Internet on psychiatry, psychology, law and public policy. He can be reached via his substack at www.Drjeffreyaschaler.substack.net

FYI: The Opinion Editor of the Baltimore Sun, Mr. Philip Caldwell, refused to publish my response to an opinion piece he published, shown above, after leading me on with teasers. Coldwell’s odd behavior is undoubtedly due to two factors: the dictatorial influence of the paper’s current owners, Armstrong Williams and Sinclair Broadcasting, both supporters of Trump. This is happening all over the country. The second is Coldwell’s spinelessness. He is 29 years old and deficient in courage. What is more important to me is how people like Sinclair and Williams are influencing freedom of speech around the country.

Trump, as we all know by now, is a chronic liar. Coldwell allowed the paper to get rid of a world-renowned and respected political cartoonist, Kevin “KAL” Kallaugher.

I have no sympathy for anyone who supports Trump. Trump now protects pedophiles in addition to cold-blooded murderers, and of course he is a convicted felon. If you search Armstrong Williams at the Baltimore Sun, and review his writings, you will see the crap he has written. res ipsa loquitur . The facts speech for themselves. The Sun, unfortunately, is now Williams’ and he makes sure there is no such thing as freedom of expression. No opposition to anything Trump might want. Good writing and diversity of expression is now gone. As a result, the Baltimore Sun, which used to be a great newspaper, is ruined.

Kevin “KAL” Kallaugher, long a liberal/politically independent cartoonist and economist, was fired immediately by Williams when ownership changed hands in 2024. He now publishes in the Guardian.

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JAS

When they start shooting white people

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Friends:

Why do ICE agents cover their faces?

A bully is easily unmasked as a coward.

“The executioner’s face is always well hidden.” [Bob Dylan]

There are so many issues I want to address! I have decided to take a stream-of-consciousness approach to commenting on them, rather than a single cohesive essay. I realize I am rambling. After this post I plan to go after and analyze ICE agents and Trump’s supporters on the Hill. I want to focus on why people support Trump. I want to focus on his sycophants.

A reminder: As my friends and colleagues here know, I am a psychologist. In addition to teaching various aspects of psychology, justice, law and public policy since 1990, I have been in private practice as an existential psychoanalyst for over 50 years. I continue to work on line with a few people who are serious about working on themselves. I enjoy supervising and training psychotherapists who have been well established in private practice. I was originally trained as a gestalt therapist. I am fortunate to have had extremely good teachers over the course of many years. Fritz Perls, Lore Perls, other leaders in Gestalt Therapy taught me true Gestalt Therapy. Thomas Szasz, and others influenced my thinking greatly following that. My relationship with Tom was tremendously important. The late Rabbi Amos Gunsberg (61 West 74^th street), also a physical therapist, CPA, psychoanalyst originally trained by Theodore Reik, he had some very famous people as his patients. Amos taught me a tremendous amount about the nature of mind and consciousness. I was very close with Amos over the course of 20 years.

Each of those people were very influenced by what happened in Germany in 1930s and 1940s. The rise and fall of the Third Reich. If you are curious about what is involved in existential psychotherapy, read Irvin Yalom’s book entitled Existential Psychotherapy, and other related works. Very few analysts focus on the issues raised by Yalom and other existentialists: isolation, freedom and responsibility, meaninglessness, and of course the fear of death. I will be lecturing on these topics, along with three of Tom’s books, The Myth of Psychotherapy, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, and the Meaning of Mind in the near future.

I taught many courses on psychology to thousands of students: at American University’s School of Public Affairs, the then department of Justice, Law and Society, Johns Hopkins, Peabody Conservatory of Music, the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, community colleges, etc. Politically, I am a classical liberal in the way of F.A. Hayek.

My father was a Holocaust survivor, and I spent a great deal of my adult intellectual life studying and teaching the pedigree of ideas that led to the Holocaust and authoritarianism in general.

I used F.A. Hayek’s book entitled The Road to Serfdom as a required text. He wrote it to describe how the Holocaust happened. It became a basis for my identification and identity as a classical liberal, or libertarian. In addition to my friendship with Tom Szasz, my thinking is strongly influenced by Sir Karl Popper (The Open Society) and the late Princeton Professor of Philosophy Walter Kaufmann, two of his books: The Faith of a Heretic and Without Guilt and Justice. I remain a devout atheist.

Here is a letter published on the editorial page of The Washington Post on January 6, 2020, that describes my view of libertarianism or classical liberalism:

“I believe Henry Olsen’s understanding of classical liberalism or libertarianism, as expressed in his Jan. 3 op-ed, “Libertarianism is losing its grip on conservative thought. Good.,” was incomplete.

I taught Friedrich Hayek’s classic “The Road to Serfdom,” long considered the “bible” of classical liberalism, for many years as a professor at American University’s School of Public Affairs.

One of the reasons libertarianism is “losing its grip” is because libertarians are a heterogeneous, hardly a homogeneous, population. That is true for Democrats as well, which is why, in my opinion, they keep losing to Republicans. Many libertarians disagree on the proper role of the state. Many libertarians believe that when it comes to the “myth of mental illness,” psychiatrist Thomas Szasz’s seminal argument, a “therapeutic state” is desirable. The writings of Szasz were eschewed by some libertarians I know at the Cato Institute and elsewhere: “We all think Dr. Szasz is a great libertarian, but his views on mental illness are crazy.” Their understanding of Szasz is incomplete and in fact consistent with their other first premises.

Classical liberalism is not anarchism. The proper role of the state is to protect us from others, not to protect us from ourselves. People should have a right to smoke cigarettes, but one does not have a right to inflict secondhand smoke on others. And of course, Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, et al., were staunchly opposed to socialism, the true road to serfdom.”

Jeffrey A. Schaler

Ellicott City, Md.

The link is https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-complicated-goals-of-true-libertarianism/2020/01/06/e38e7f32-2f70-11ea-bffe-020c88b3f120_story.html

Like Timothy Snyder and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, I am very concerned with the similarities between Trump and Hitler, Stephen Miller and the gestapo, what I call the Maganazis, the ICE gestapo, etc. At the end of the movie Nuremberg, starring Russell Crowe as Goring, there is material from the psychiatrist Kelly who examined and worked with Goring. https://time.com/7331917/nuremberg-movie-true-story/ He asserts it can all happen again. Not only was he accurate, I believe we are witness the return. Trump is dangerous, in addition to being obviously demented.

His assistant Stephen Miller is Jewish. Jews who turned on other Jews in concentration camps were called “Kapo.” Look up the term on Wikipedia.

Even friends do not take me seriously when I warn of the similarities between Trump’s behavior and that of the Nazis. I assigned Robert Proctor’s book entitled Racial Hygiene, and related books, to my classes at American University, plus I took my students on field trips regularly to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. I believe I was harassed by the chairman of our department at American University for my views on psychiatry. I also believe people in power there were antisemitic. I will elaborate on that later. I thought Proctor’s book was very good, however, I did not like him personally at all. I had some personal correspondence with him and it did not go well. I believe he was cowardly when he was interviewed on the PBS special entitled Cancer Wars. He knew what was taking shape in the name of public health, and yet he refused to warn the world.

I have severed several relationships with friends and colleagues because of their support for Trump. I won’t go into that here, now. One of the worst was my former co-author, professor emeritus of communication Richard E. Vatz, formerly a Szaszian, he is now not only pro-Trump but also a drug prohibitionist. I will post my response to his recent piece in the Baltimore Sun if it gets published.

One thing Proctor pointed out is that Hitler empowered his henchmen to kill Jews and others they deemed “lives unworthy of life.” It wasn’t that Nazis were ordered to kill. Hitler empowered them to do so, especially psychiatrists. Psychiatrists were the first order the killing of Jews and others. I wrote to the heads of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC during a field trip I took students on back in the 1990s, asking why they had little to no research showing the role that psychiatrists played in the killing. They refused to respond to me.

ICE agents are similarly empowered by Trump to kill and maim, harm anyone they consider are in their way. This isn’t like Eichmann, where he claimed he was following orders. ICE agents, Kristi Noem and others in similarly powerful positions are empowered to kill or harm those they deem enemies of America. They know Trump will protect them, as will the SCOTUS.

They know their lawlessness is protected and condoned by SCOTUS. What they do not know is that this terrible civil war will be over one day, and they will eventually be held responsible for what they have done. I think they have committed treason, and I believe they should be held accountable when found guilty. If that means execution, then so be it. Families and friends of those harmed by violence will track them down and if not kill them, certainly will beat the hell out of them. That is the way of the world. I am not condoning it. I am just saying there is a high probability it will occur.

By the way, Stephen Miller apparently lives in Arlington, Virginia. (That is just outside of D.C.). His Arlington house was on sale for $3.75 million this past October 2025.

The ICE agent who murdered Renee Nicole Good, the 37-year-old mother of three who was shot several times in the face and head at close range in Minneapolis on Jan 7, 2026 is Jonathan Ross. Ross is a 20-year veteran of military and law enforcement.

I watched on January 18, 2026 as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem strongly defended Ross on a “Face the Nation” interview, instructing host Margaret Brennan to stop saying Ross’s name. “Don’t say his name!”

Her blaming of others like Biden and Walz for what ICE agent Ross did is pathetic.

Pause. Let’s take a break. Listen to the following music from The Last Waltz (The Band, movie by Martin Scorcese) played and sung by Eric Clapton. I’ve included the lyrics.

[Chorus]
Further on up the road
Someone’s going to hurt you like you hurt me
Further on up the road
Someone’s going to hurt you like you hurt me
Further on up the road
Baby, just you wait and see

[Verse]
You got to reap just what you sow
That old saying is true
You got to reap just what you sow
That old saying is true
Just like you mistreat someone
Someone’s going to mistreat you

You been laughing, pretty baby
Someday you are going to be crying
You been laughing, pretty baby
Someday you are going to be crying
Further on up the road
You will find out I was not lying

[Chorus]

January 4, 2026

In my opinion, Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Maduro is an outrageous violation of international law and Venezuelan sovereignty.

I don’t question how Maduro ran the government there. I suspect he was a dictator, as people claim he was.

To me, however, that is not a valid reason for American intervention. Governments are harming their citizens all over the world. Where should we intervene?

There are horrible things being done by governments all over the world. That does not justify our getting involved in their internal affairs.

Narco-terrorism is a red-herring, a made-up word and reason to justify criminal intervention in the autonomy of another country. The term is used to justify American aggression. Military aggression is used by our criminal president Trump to advance his personal interests, to appear heroic, when in fact he is a horrible president, one of the worst we have ever seen.

No one makes people consume drugs that may culminate in their death. US government authorities claiming to be experts on addiction know nothing about why people take drugs. Look at our past “drug czars.” General Barry McCaffrey was director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) and when it came to understanding addiction and drug policy he was one of the biggest idiots around. Just because he may have been good about military actions does not make him knowledgeable about why people use drugs.

As I have pointed out here on my substack and elsewhere, we could turn the world into a police state and drugs would still be accessible. Think about this. Look at prisons, a true police state. Anyone can get any drugs there.

If there is any slowing in the manufacture and transport of illegal drugs as a result of our involvement in Venezuela, there will only be increased production in other countries. Demand drives drug production. The fact that people want drugs is why they are manufactured, transported and sold.

JAS

ijas@me.com

Comments/replies are welcome

The doctor-patient relationship in its historical context depends on the medical (or psychiatric) situation and the social scene. By medical situation is meant the technical task at hand and the available means to cope with it. The physician’s and patient’s capacity for self-reflection and communication, as well as their special technical skills, are included in the category of “medical situation.” The social scene refers to the socio-political and the intellectual-scientific climate of the time.

In a previous article Szasz and Hollender (12) delineated 3 basic models of the doctor-patient relationship. These are (a) activity-passivity, (b) guidance-cooperation and (c) mutual participation. Activity-passivity refers to those instances in which the physician does something to a patient who is completely inactive (or passive). This is necessary whenever the patient is unconscious (e.g., comatose, anesthetized). Guidance-cooperation presupposes that the physician will tell the patient what to do and the latter will comply or obey. Both parties are “active” and contribute to the relationship. The main difference between them pertains to status and power. Mutual participation designates a relationship in which ihe doctor-patient contract is essentially that of a partnership. The physician helps the patient to help himself. This model is particularly applicable to the management of chronic illnesses, to psychoanalysis and to some modifications of psychoanalytic therapy. The models are illustrated in Table I.

Employing these conceptual models, we propose in this essay to present an historical overview of certain changes in the doctor-patient relationship. Since our interest is primarily in calling attention to (1 Read at the 114th annual meeting of The American Psychiatric Association, San Francisco, Calif., May 12-16, 1958. 2 From the Department of Psychiatry, State Uni. versity of New York, Upstate Medical Center, Syracuse, N. Y.) correlations between social conditions and medical practice models, we shall comment only on a few historical periods. These will be offered as vignettes to illustrate our thesis. The following epochs and their concomitant doctor-patient patterns will be considered: 1. Ancient Egypt (approx. 4000 to 1000 B.C.). 2. Greek Enlightenment (approx. 600 to 100 B.C.). 3. Medieval Europe and the Inquisition (approx. 1200 to 1600 A.D.). 4. The French Revolution (late 18th century). 5. Central Europe (late 19th century). 6. The contemporary American scene (post World-War II).

ANCIENT EGYPT

From earliest times, man feared helplessness in an unknown universe. In his own defense he invented methods of coping with anxiety. Implicit in these methods has been man’s belief in an ability to manipulate events, to control and direct nature in his own behalf.

The doctor-patient relationship, which evolved from the priest-supplicant relationship(2), retained the belief in an ability of a parent-figure to manipulate events on behalf of the patient. Fearing helplessness, sickness and death, man has attempted to master nature by means of 1. Magic and mysticism, 2. Theology and 3. Rationality (or science). Each of these evolving belief systems, with its particular technology, has served the healing art. Healers have been in the past (and continue to be in the present) magicians, priests and doctors. With the development of social organization, or civilization, the healing role became institutionalized as sorcerer, shaman, priest and physician. Each was imbued with the metaphor of magic. At various times, these diverse healing roles have existed side by side in the same society; they may also co-exist in the role-functions of a single individual (e.g., the shaman). As the functions of instinctive self-help and mutual aid were gradually institutionalized into specialized

healer roles, status-role differences between healer and sufferer appeared for the first time.

Describing the treatment process, Sigerist stated: The magician came or the patient was brought to him. After some preparation, some purifications, the magic words were spoken, some rites were performed, and all was over. In many cases this was probably enough for the patient who was under great nervous tension to feel suddenly improved or even cured (6).

Even ancient Egyptian medicine, however, was not devoid of empirico-rational features. These were largely limited to the treatment of externally visible disorders, such as fractures. Problems of “internal” medicine-like those of psychiatry-present certain observational difficulties in the face of a “naive” (culturally unsophisticated or childish) approach. Thus an infusion of magic in connection with these medical endeavors has persisted much longer than in relation to external and visible parts of the body. Even today, children-and people generally-have many more fantasies (and “fantastic” ideas) about the insides of their bodies than they do, for instance, about their hands or feet.

It seems unlikely-and this is largely an assumption, since we possess little information on this subject-that in ancient Egyptian medicine the activity-passivity type of relationship was ever altered. Neither the social circumstances nor the technical tasks and tools available were such as to require a modification of this relationship.

CREEK ENLIGHTENMENT

As Zilboorg noted, “Hippocrates lived in an age unique in history. . . It was the age of Hellenic enlightenment”( 13).

In about the fifth century, B.C., the Greeks developed a system of medicine based on an empirico-rational approach. By this it is meant that they relied increasingly on naturalistic observation, supplemented by practical trial and error experience, abandoning, as much as they could(2) magical and religious explanations of bodily disorders. Singer, for example, described the Hippocratic writers as clear-eyed observers, unmoved in their pursuit of truth by any preconceived view of its nature, uncorrupted by the jargon of the schools, naked heroes of science facing the world as it is and not as it may be thought to be(7).

Hippocrates’ rationalistic orientation can be best illustrated by the famous statement attributed to him concerning epilepsy: As for this disease called divine, surely it too has its nature and causes whence it orginates, just like other diseases, and is curable by means comparable to their cure (7).

In carrying empirical medicine to new heights, the Greeks were among the first to emphasize and develop what has become an historically important schism, namely, the separation of medicine (and science) from religion (and ethics). Politically, too, they were among the first nations to evolve toward a democratic form of social organization. They recognized the desirability of equality, at least among the elect (i.e., among the nobility or “non-slaves”). Guidance-cooperation, and to a lesser extent, mutual participation, were the characteristic patterns of the doctor-patient relationship. The Hippocratic oath, while overfly a code of ethics for the physician, is, in a less obvious sense, also a “Bill of Rights” for the patient. The rules of the game (as it were), codifying the physician’s prescribed attitude toward his patient, were defined, in part, as follows:

The regimen I adopt shall be for the benefit of my patients according to my ability and judgment, and not for their hurt or for any wrong . . . Whatsoever house I enter, there will I go for the benefit of the sick, refraining from all wrongdoing or corruption, and especially from any act of seduction, of male or female, of bond or free. Whatsoever things I see or hear concerning the life of men, in my attendanae on the sick or even apart therefrom, which ought not to be noised abroad, I will keep silence thereon, counting such things to be as sacred secrets(8). (italics added).

This oath is of considerable interest from the point of view of the doctor-patient relationship and its connections with the prevalent socio-political pattern of its time. Not only does the Oath reflect the contemporary ethical ideal of democracy for -and equality among- the free citizens of the state, but it rises above it and commands a higher level of humanism. We base this inference on the Hippocratic injunction to accord the same human privileges to the “bonded” patient, for slave, as accorded to free citizens of the state. Hippocratic tradition raised medical ethics above the self-interests of class and, by implication, nation. This supranational concept of health as an ethical value persists to this day, but it has undergone important reverses during practically every major war and social upheaval.

MEDIEVAL EUROPE AND THE INQUISITION

The revival of religious and mystical world views following the fall of the Roman Empire, and culminating in the Crusades and witch-hunts of the middle ages, brought with it a regression in both political and medical relationships. A major historical event worthy of special mention occurred in 1484, when Pope Innocent VIII issued a papal bull in support of the popular medieval belief in witches.

The Inquisition now shifted into high gear. Two inquisitional theologians, Spreng- er and Kraemer, authored that medieval textbook of clinical psychiatry entitled Malleus Male/icarum-The Witches’ Hammer-which fanned a smouldering demonology into a flame which engulfed Europe and eventually spread to the shores of the New World.8 In regard to this period, Zilboorg observed:

Galen’s humoral theory is pushed into the background and the devil is elevated [again] to the role of causative agent of melancholy. Sin and mental disease have become equated in the mind of man; the major sin of man and woman and the major preoccupation of the devil is sex(13).

Thus the primitive, magico-religious beliefs embodied in the Old and New Testaments were revitalized and charged with power. Social relations, too, drifted towards ever-increasing depths of inequality and exploitation. While feudal monarchies dominated the political scene, medieval Catholicism rose to achieve a level of secular power unmatched in its history. The political dominance of feudal royalty was paralleled by the moral dominance of contemporary religion. The divine right of kings had as its corollary the subjugation of the masses. Magic, mysticism and superstition were rampart. Good and evil were (3 Although Massachusetts reversed most of its witchcraft convictions in 1711, it was as recently as August, 1957 that the names of 6 women, executed in Salem, and branded as witches for 265 years, were cleared by legislative resolve.) God-given and sharply and indelibly etched. This was the tenor of the time. As would be expected, medicine and religion were inextricably entwined. The physician, imbued with magical powers shared by the priests, was in an exalted position. His patient, unless of the nobility, was regarded as a helpless infant. The model of the doctor-patient relationship, like that of lord-serf, was activity-passivity.

Mental disorders, too, it should be noted, were regarded in the religious frame of reference. People were, so to speak, either possessed by God, and therefore saints, or possessed by the Devil, and hence witches. Neither fell within a category which could be called “medical” or “psychiatric.”

It is interesting to note, in this connection, that while in our time there has been a widespread desire to exonerate, as it were, the witches either as innocent victims of their time, or as “mentally ill” rather than “bewitched,” there has been no similar clamor for revising the diagnostic category of “saint” (e.g., Joan of Arc). Yet it would seem that if logic rather than sentimentality governs the upgrading of “witches” to “patients,” an analogous downgrading of “saints” to “patients” would follow( 10).

It is consistent with the “human atmosphere” sketched above that it was during this period that the insane asylums, which were nothing but dungeons in which mental patients were chained until they died, came into being. Such were the historical-and from the point of view of the evolution of man’s struggle for freedom, logical-antecedents of the French Revolution.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

The spirit of liberalism initiated by the Renaissance, fostered by nascent Protestantism and brought to a high pitch by the French Revolution re-animated man’s search for equality, dignity and empirical science as opposed to dogma. The suc- cessful Protestant “protest”-the original meaning of this word is probably rarely remembered now-against the unopposed might of the Roman Catholic Church was followed by America’s successful overthrow of English dominance, and then by that momentous social upheaval, the French Revolution.

There are striking illustrations of the effects of the dominant socio-political events on medical behavior during this period. As we noted, the pre-revolutionary dungeon which served as a mental hospital was the appropriate place of confinement for socially undesirable elements in a society which viewed life and the deviant people in it only in two colors: black and white-witch and saint. The French Revolution-and the events which led to itbrought this period to a socio-political end. Pinel’s effort to free mental patients was equally dramatic, but it would seem, much less effective. Today, we look upon the “open hospital” and so-called milieutherapy as if they constituted modern dynamic-psychiatric innovations. Yet, their relevance seems to lie mainly in that mental patients were until recently-and are today still-locked up” (committed) (11). Relieving them from this social and iatrogenic trauma may then seem like a form of “therapy.” How different is this phenomenon from the well-known witticism about the man beating his head against the wall, because-as he said-it felt so good when he stopped it?

The effect of Pinel’s efforts, however, should not be minimized. Certainly the status of the patient and the attitude of the physician were altered. The model of this relationship, accordingly, changed (although not completely) from activity-passivity to guidance-cooperation. It should be recalled that more than 200 years earlier, Weyer had advocated reforms in the treatment of the “insane.” His pleas, however, fell on deaf ears. He was, so to speak, ahead of his time. By this it is meant that he advocated an altered doctor-patient relationship which was premature in terms of the social scene.

LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY CENTRAL EUROPE

The rapid growth of science during the 18th and 19th centuries led to the development of the physician as the expert engi- neer of the body as a machine. This state of affairs favored, as we know, developments principally in microbiology and surgery. Concurrently, patterns of the doctor-patient relationship stressed the latter’s dependency and inferiority. In medicine proper, the development of anesthesia stimulated progress in surgery. The main non-surgical illnesses of the time were, of course, syphilis, tuberculosis and typhoid fever. In treatment, the activity-passivity, or at most the guidance-cooperation, type of doctor-patient relationship prevailed.

In the late 19th century two major psychiatric trends developed. One was the Kraepelinian, or “organic” approach; the other, originated by Breuer and Freud, was the psychoanalytic-and in a broad, contemporary sense, the psycho-socialapproach. Both, as we well know, are still very much with us and constitute, in fact, the principal conceptual and methodological viewpoints of present-day psychiatrists.

Commenting on this phase of psychiatric history, Szasz stated:

Xraepelin’s chief objects of observation were inmates of mental hospitals[4]. He studied them by direct common-sense observation. The underlying assumption was first that they suffered from diseases much the same as other diseases with which physicians were familiar, and second that society and the physicians who studied them were “normal” and constituted the standards with which their behavior was compared. Accordingly, patients were subsumed under categories (“diagnoses”) based on the behavioral phenomena (“symptoms”) that were judged to be dominant. The spirit of the inquiry precluded emphasis on specifically individualistic features and determinants; Kraepelin’s approach, as Zilboorg [13] noted, was therefore at once humane and inhuman. He was interested in man, but was not interested in the patient as an individual (9).

The Kraepelinian or “organic” approach to psychiatry thus rests on the premise that the patient “has”-in the sense that he “possesses” something-a “disease.” The eradication of the disease is thus pictured on the model of ridding the body of pathogenic bacteria. In a way this is a scientifically updated analogue of exorcising the devil(5). Adherence to this orientation predisposes to continued espousal of the activity-passivity or the guidance-cooperation models as the appropriate types of doctor-patient relationships in psychiatric treatment.

From the standpoint of our present interest, one of the most significant features of Breuer’s psychological discoveries lies in the great attention which he was able to pay to his patient as a human being. In terms of the doctor-patient relationship, the cathartic method meant that it was worth while to listen to the patient at great length. While this may seem like a minor point today, it should be remembered that the listening role, extended over a period of time, was a radical departure in the medical and psychiatric practice of the 19th century.

Breuer’s personal qualities and interests made it possible for him to develop what must be judged as the first genuinely communicative relationship (in a medical setting) between doctor and patient. As a result of it, as Breuer reported, the patient’s “. . . life became known to me to an extent to which one person’s life is seldom known to another. . .“( 1).

Breuer’s relationship with his patients must, for proper emphasis, be contrasted with that of Charcot. Charcot, no doubt, may have divined some of his patients’ secrets such as unfulfilled (sexual) longings. We submit, however, that he never knew his patients in the sense in which Breuer and Freud came to know theirs. Accordingly, Breuer and Freud’s historical role lies (among others) in having reintroduced, as it were, the patient into the medical arena as an active, cooperative-and indeed, collaborative-participant in illness and in health. The early cathartic method opened the way not only to the psychoanalytic method but-from the point of view of the doctor-patient relationship-also to the development and broad implementation of the model of mutual participation.

It is apparent that while in the Kraepelinian viewpoint “mental diseases” are regarded as entities located in the patient’s body, and usually in his brain, according to the psychoanalytic approach - as it is generally understood today - the same phenomena are considered as problems or conflicts in human relationships. The full effect of these divergent views on the nature of the doctor-patient relationship has been appreciated only recently.

There is the danger of over-psychologizing Breuer and Freud’s early ideas con- cerning the nature of their own work. It seems to us that while they were well aware of the “human problems,” so to speak, with which they dealt, they nevertheless continued to formulate their work in the traditional theoretical framework of their time (i.e., “disease-and-health”). The alleged diseases simply were regarded as belonging to a special group, namely those due to the damming up of libido. Moreover, according to Strachey, To the end of his life, Freud continued to adhere to the chemical aetiology of the “actual” neuroses and to believe that a physical basis for all mental phenomena might ultimately be found(1).

THE CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN SCENE

The development of our current ideas and practices, both in medicine and in psychiatry, reflect the influences of 3 main factors: 1. From psychoanalysis specifically, and more generally from modern Ameri- can psychiatry (Meyer, Sullivan), stems an increasing appreciation of the importance of the patient’s role as that of a selfdeterminate partner in the therapeutic relationship. 2. Increasing medical and social emphasis on chronic illnesses (e.g., diabetes, arthritis, cardio-renal diseases, etc.) during the firsthalf of this century made it necessary for physicians to enlist their patients’ collaboration as medical assistants, as it were, in the management of their own health problems.4 Since “complete cure” is not a meaningful concept in most of these medical situations, it is for technical reasons usually impossible for the physician to rely on active-passive techniques. The guidance-cooperation model is therefore feasible but falls short of being desirable. 3. The steady drift in social relations (in America as well as in most parts of the world) toward increasing acceptance of, and often insistence on, “democratic” or “socialistic” (equalitarian) patterns of behavior exerts-we assume-a (4 In this connection it is interesting to recall the Hippocratic aphorism, “Life is short, art is long, opportunity fugitive, experimenting dangerous, reason ing difficult: it is necessary not only to do oneself what is right, but also to be seconded by the patient, by those who attend him, by external circumstances” (3, p. 96; italics added)). pressure on medical relations to conform to a similar pattern, whenever possible.

In (non-psychiatric) medicine, all these factors tend to favor the increasing utilization of mutual participation in the doctorpatient relationship. At the same time, the doctor is involved, probably more often than ever before, in the task of educating his patient in matters of health, illness or treatment.

In psychoanalysis and psycho-socially oriented psychiatry, the same factors have led to two major developments. One is the relatively widespread acceptance of, indeed demand for, psychotherapy. Thus, the social and economic success of psychoanalysis, which has been greater in the United States than in any other country, probably has resulted - as has been suggested by others too - from the political and socio-economic climate of this country. The second development, in which psychoanalysis again has pointed the way, is the need in many situations for both doctor and patient to scrutinize the very relationship in which they are engaged. Freud’s fundamental concept of “transference” was the first step in this direction. Inquiry along this line received great impetus, however, also from the work and findings of sociologists and cultural anthropologists.

All this is not to say that the psychoanalytic method of treatment rests wholly on, or employs only, the model of mutual participation. There is controversy over certain important variables in this regard, for example concerning how much regression is fostered by the analyst in the analytic situation. Since we are not con- cerned now with a discussion of the precise details of a particular mode of psychiatric or medical treatment, it should suffice to note that the scrutiny of diverse therapeutic interactions in terms of their characteristic doctor-patient relationships would constitute an important means of clarifying dissimilar operations, now subsumed by a single name (e.g., “psychotherapy”).

SUMMARY

The doctor-patient relationship which characterizes a given situation depends on two principal categories of variables: the medical situation and the social scene. The cultural matrix impinges on the individual characteristics of both physician and patient in the form of learned orientations to disease, treatment, cure and to the doctor-patient relationship itself.

We have briefly reviewed and commented on the probable connections between the socio-historical and intellectual-scientific circumstances of 6 historical epochs and the prevalent type(s) of doctor-patient relationship.

It is our thesis that the value of a specific pattern of the doctor-patient relationship can be established only by evaluating all the relevant and pertinent variables. We would suggest, however, that awareness of the cultural relativity of the doctor-patient relationship should make us skeptical of the assumption that our current practices are “good” or the “best possible.” Probably more often than not, they are neither, but simply reflect the congruence of social expectations and socially shared ethical orientations of physicians. In this connection, physicians, and perhaps psychiatrists particularly, explicitly may consider which of the following 3 alternatives they favor: 1. That they reflect the prevalent social values and expectations of their culture; 2. That they lag behind the social changes of the time and represent the values of the immediate past; or 3. That they join with those forces in society which lead to its modification (whether to “progress” or “regress”). Critical examination of the doctor-patient relationship usually predisposes to change, while non- scrutiny of human social relations favors the status quo.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Breuer, J., and Freud, S.: Studies on Hysteria (1893-95), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, Ltd., 1955, Vol. II.

2. Edelstein, Ludwig: Bull. Hist. Med. 5: 201, 1937.

3. Anon. Aphorism. Encyc. Britann. 2: 96.

4. Kraepelin, E.: Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia. Edinburgh: E. and S. Livingstone, 1921.

5. Reider, N.: Am. J. Psychiat., 111: 851, 1955.

6. Sigerist, H. E.: A History of Medicine, Vol. I, New York: Oxford University Press, 1951.

7. Singer, C.: Hippocrates and the Hippocratic Collection. Encyc. Britann. 11 :583.

8. Singer, C.: Medicine, History of. Encyc. Britann. 15: 196.

9. Szasz, T. S.: Am. J. Psychiat. 114: 405, 1957.

10. Szasz, T; S.: A.M.A. Arch. Neurol. and Psychiat., 76: 432, 1956.

11. Szasz, T. S.: J. Nerv. and Ment. Dis., 125: 293, 1957.

12. Szasz, T. S., and Hollender, M. H.: A.M.A. Archives of Internal Medicine, 97: 585, 1958.

13. Zilboorg, G.: A History of Medical Psychology, New York: W. W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1941.

It is unfortunate that the House of Representatives recently voted to overrule a Veterans Administration policy calling alcoholism ''willful misconduct'' [''House Votes to Restore Benefits to Alcoholic Veterans,'' Oct. 18]. Contrary to the claim that this is an important victory for all recovering alcoholics, it is first and foremost a victory for the alcoholism treatment industry and a defeat for scientific medicine.

Ironically, on April 20, 1988, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with the bible of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). AA is one of the strongest proponents of the disease model of alcoholism. The court upheld the authority of the VA to define alcoholism as the result of ''willful misconduct.'' And as The Big Book says: ... the main problem of the alcoholic centers in his mind rather than in his body."

Although Justice Byron R. White, writing for the majority, said that the court was not deciding ''whether alcoholism is a disease whose course its victims cannot control,'' he also noted that there was ''a substantial body of medical literature that even contests the proposition that alcoholism is a disease, much less that it is a disease for which the victim bears no responsibility.''

A person does not will the onset of diabetes, hypertension, the presence of a malignant tumor. Here it would be wrong to assign responsibility for the disease. This is not the case with an alcoholic or drug addict. A person both enters and exits usage through an act of will.

Since the word addiction is defined as a volitional act and the relationship between the mind and the body is unknown, it is inaccurate to state with certainty that alcoholism is a disease. The mind can't be sick.

Many disease model spokespersons are recovered alcoholics and have an emotional investment in viewing themselves as helpless to their own behaviors. A majority of these people are seriously lacking in scientific backgrounds. They say scientific validity ''interferes with the process'' of helping people who need help and claim special qualification to help others.They perceive any challenge to the disease concept as ''a challenge to the validity of their own emotional ordeal and conversion to sobriety.''

The treatment industry also has a substantial economic investment in maintaining the disease concept. As long as alcoholism is considered a disease, medical insurance pays for treating it.

Is the disease model of alcoholism scientific? No. Simply calling behavior a disease process does not make it one, even if doing so assists in creating sobriety. Is the treatment policy based on bad science? Yes. Is there any chance that this attitude will change in the near future? Bloody unlikely.

JEFFREY A. SCHALER
Silver Spring
The writer was chairman of the Montgomery County Drug Abuse Advisory Council.

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Former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius spoke on Dec. 16, 2009 to a friendly crowd of health care providers and others at Sheppard Pratt Health System near Baltimore, a location for a broad array of psychiatric services, concerning mental health coverage, and, according to reports, she defended the expansion of such coverage with all of the familiar shibboleths.

She argued, consistent with the administration’s claim that expanding health care in general to 30 million or more citizens would actually save us money, that the vastly increased mental health parity program would additionally, as the Baltimore Sun reported her message, “improve care for millions of Americans who do not get all the mental health services they need.”

In the speech, Ms. Sebelius said, “One in 5 Americans will have a mental health illness this year and almost half will have a mental illness in their lifetimes. Yet 10 million people didn’t get the mental health care they needed last year, and 20 million didn’t get substance abuse services.”

Ms. Sebelius proclaimed her own false analogy of mental health to physical health by saying, “If 10 [million] or 20 million Americans were walking around bleeding, we’d have alarm bells going off.”

But if mental heath professions’ own estimates of the current number of people who are mentally ill are correct, Ms. Sebelius is way off in her calculations. As Mark Twain quipped, “There are lies, damned lies and statistics.”

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) claims that more than 50 percent of Americans are mentally ill in their lifetime - and recent APA studies dwarf that statistic. Moreover, the problems that qualify as “mental disorders,” all those listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), are virtually without limit.

Significantly, the new coverage of mental illness covers a vast array of the “worried well,” who have no neurological or mental disorders but simply have problems in living. Support for mental health parity in the new health reform bills relies on the public’s false inference that the prototypical mental disorder is dementia or some other organically based brain disease, which constitute only a tiny percentage and atypical sampling of the hundreds of “mental disorders” listed in DSM-IV.

Typically, psychiatrists label those unhappy people they concede have no physical illness as having “social anxiety disorder” or some other equally benign “disorder.” Such people can be in costly, insurance-covered therapy indefinitely. As one psychologist told us, “Anyone who comes in with any problem can be diagnosed as having ’adjustment disorder.’ ” (e.g., “with anxiety,” DSM-IV Code 309.24).

There are many such diagnoses of easily applicable disorders, including “antisocial personality disorder” (DSM-IV Code 301.7), “avoidant personality disorder” (DSM-IV Code 301.82), and others vague enough to be applied to almost anyone. This is one of the reasons that the American Psychiatric Association claims that in a lifetime far more than a majority of citizens will suffer from a mental disorder, and the estimates are increasing.

In the December 2008 APA’s Archives of General Psychiatry, there is a report that “almost half of college-aged individuals had a psychiatric disorder in the past year [emphasis added],” and this includes heavy drinking, categorized as “alcohol use disorder” (DSM-IV Code 305.00).

When everyone is sick, what is normal? “What is healthy?”

On one strategy to deal with these issues, perhaps Ms. Sebelius and mental health skeptics can agree: It is high time to let a national debate begin - before mental health parity becomes part of universal national health care insurance.

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August 16, 2025

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Just Say No to Involuntary Commitment

By Jeffrey A. Schaler, Ph.D.

Baltimore Sun reporter Carson Swick has drawn attention to an important unconstitutional action set into motion by President Trump and his Republican sycophants (“Trump executive order will allow forced institutionalization of homeless people,” July 26, 2025). Forced or involuntary institutionalization is a procedure whereby law-abiding citizens living on sidewalks and other public properties (because they may have nowhere else to live), are forced into prisons called mental institutions because they are said to be mentally ill and thereby dangerous. They have committed no crimes, however, they are treated as though they are criminals. (See also “Mentally Ill Mistreated In Custody, Suit Claims,” News item by Taylor Robinson, New York Times, August 14, 2025, p. A18).

A state may not deprive any person [see Amendment 14A: “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”] of liberty without due process of law, neither may the federal government. Numerous higher-court rulings have shown how such actions are unconstitutional. Yet, that’s exactly what’s happening via involuntary commitment to mental hospitals. Once again, Trump’s Republican base has stooped to base rhetoric labeling the homeless “dangerous,” because they are allegedly “mentally ill.” They are neither mentally ill nor unusually dangerous. In my opinion, Republicans supporting Trump are far more dangerous to law-abiding citizens than homeless people. Lest we forget, Trump has been convicted of thirty - four felonies.

Involuntary commitment and the insanity defense were favorite targets of mine when I was a professor at American University’s School of Public Affairs, Department of Justice, Law and Society and at Johns Hopkins University. These unconstitutional state actions are like two sides of the same metaphorical coin. In the first case, persons are treated by the state as if they have committed a crime, when in fact no crime has occurred. In the second case, persons are guilty of a crime, and the state treats them as if they are innocent. (See https://nlihc.org/resource/trump-administration-releases-harmful-executive-order-homelessness).

Jennifer Rubin, a former opinion writer for the Washington Post and founder of The Contrarian who left the Post this past January, apparently disgusted by the Post’s refusal to take a stand against Trump during the recent election, wrote a piece entitled “Words and Phrases We Can Do Without”(contrarian+jen-rubins-morning-columns@substack.com).

One phrase, she emphasized, that we can do without is the oxymoron “civil commitment.” George Orwell would have added the phrase to his list of double talk/doublethink.

As Rubin pointed out, there is nothing civil about depriving people of life, liberty and due process of law when they are innocent of committing a crime. Poverty is not a crime. Houselessness is not a crime.

President Trump confuses homelessness with houselessness. My eldest granddaughter used to remind me, “Pa-Pa, home is where the heart is. Any place can be a home.” She would say that to me when I was anxious about selling our house of many years. Yes, we were leaving both our house and home. However, we will establish or create a new home wherever we go.

My late friend and colleague, psychiatrist Thomas Szasz spent the majority of his career protecting people from the dual injustices of involuntary commitment and the insanity defense. Our Bill of Rights does not include a footnote stating “for mentally healthy people only.” Government cannot deprive innocent people of life, liberty or property without due process of law. Trump and his supporters seem to ignore past rulings about this. Moreover, our Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution were not written for lawyers: They were written for the common man.

Stare decisis is a legal term referring to prior court rulings that normally establish precedence over subsequent legal action. Three past court cases are, in my opinion, relevant to the legality of the involuntary-commitment policy that Trump seeks to implement. Those prior court rulings are ignored. The prior cases are the following:

O'Connor v. Donaldson (1975), a landmark case, established that “states cannot constitutionally confine a non-dangerous mentally ill individual who is capable of surviving safely in freedom either by themselves or with the help of willing family or friends. This ruling significantly curtailed the ability of states to commit individuals based solely on a diagnosis of mental illness without proof of dangerousness.

Addington v. Texas (1979): This case clarified the burden of proof required for involuntary civil commitment. The court held that the state must demonstrate the need for hospitalization with clear and convincing evidence. That—the standard—deserves direct quotation even more than do the two ensuing non-standards, a higher standard than the "preponderance of the evidence" typically used in civil cases, but less stringent than the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard used in criminal proceedings. This heightened standard reflects the significant deprivation of liberty involved in civil commitment.”

And Foucha v. Louisiana (1992): This ruling focused on the requirements for continued confinement after an insanity acquittal. The Court held that dangerousness alone, without evidence of mental illness, is not a sufficient justification to continue civil confinement. If the individual has recovered from the mental illness that led to the original commitment, they are entitled to release unless the state can demonstrate, through constitutionally adequate procedures, a new basis for confinement, such as a different mental illness and dangerousness. (The above is from artificial intelligence.)

If we say Trump is mentally ill, be it that he is breaking the law because of a thought disorder, for example, or a delusional disorder, then he is liable to be exculpated, found innocent, that is, not guilty by reason of insanity for crimes he may be accused of committing.

Trump and other politicians, be they Democrat or Republican, are often seeking reasons to get rid of people who are disturbing their scenery. They seek to “prettify” the plantation. This is called helping those afflicted with putative mental illness.

According to writers at wsww.ablechild.org, President Trump’s new executive order entitled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets” states that putting people into long-term institutions is the “most proven way” to fix public safety and homelessness. This is yet another in a long string of Trump’s well-documented and exposed lies.

Involuntary commitment is justified on the following basis: Psychiatrists and other “mental-health professionals” assert they can tell who is likely to harm self or others with an accuracy beyond that expected by chance (guessing). This cannot be done.

Mental illness is a metaphorical disease, used as a form of social control for many years now. Szasz did more than any public servant to show how persons labeled mentally ill have been discriminated against, persecuted and deprived of freedom for simply exhibiting different behavior. Being without a house or shelter to live in is a sign of poverty. This is not an indication of mental illness. Nor is it a valid reason to punish people. These facts apparently do not matter to Republicans who support Trump.

The public should also know there are no objective tests to detect the signs of mental illness. Symptoms are different from signs. Symptoms are subjective complaints. Signs are objective markers. Disease is of the body and only found in a cadaver at autopsy. Mental illness is not found in a cadaver at autopsy.

Example: Spring fever is a metaphorical disease. As such it is treatable only in a metaphorical sense.

I have confronted and debated forensic psychiatrists, psychologists and other mental-health professionals for many years about their claims to accurately predict dangerousness to self and others among those they diagnose as mentally ill. Those who know the evidence concede: We cannot predict who is likely to harm self and/or others with an accuracy beyond that expected by chance. This is a tremendously important issue. Even if we could determine who is most likely to be dangerous to self and others due to a mythical mental illness, at least three other issues must be addressed in legislative bodies. These issues include:

Mental illnesses are not listed in standard textbooks on pathology because they are diagnosed based on subjective and unreliable symptoms, not objective signs. The latter are essential to proper scientific consideration. As such symptom diagnosis alone does not meet the nosological criteria for disease classification in standard textbooks on pathology.

I debated Allen Frances, MD, professor and chairman emeritus of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine. I like and respect him a great deal. He is best known for serving as chair of the American Psychiatric Association task force overseeing the development and revision of the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Ill (see https://www.cato.org/blog/cato-unbound-mental-health-law) on how mental illness does not meet the scientific criteria necessary for inclusion as a valid disease. Dr. Frances is on record stating that “there is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you can’t define it…These concepts are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the boundaries” (See Gary Greenberg’s December 2010 Wired magazine article).

The above facts are, in my opinion, especially important as our convicted-criminal president, Donald Trump, and his sycophants seek new ways to deprive citizens of their dignity and constitutional rights because they are allegedly dangerous. The fact is, “mental illness” can be neither objectively defined nor accurately predicted. Given that the purpose of science is to accurately describe, explain, predict and influence phenomena of interest, there is no scientific basis for Trump’s proposed policy to deprive the “homeless mentally ill” of their freedom. Civil commitment of the “homeless mentally ill” is just another attempt by Republicans supporting Trump to implement what are essentially racist policies. As we shall soon see, in my opinion, President Trumap will be found to have lied about associating with convicted pedophiles Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

When I confronted colleagues in the mental health professions with scientific evidence supporting my position and against theirs, they conceded: We cannot predict who is likely to harm self and/or others with an accuracy beyond that expected by chance. This is a tremendously important issue. To summarize:

We cannot prosecute someone because we believe they are likely to commit a crime. Minority Report, an important novelette by science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick that went on to be a terrific movie starring Tom Cruise addresses the issue of involuntary commitment in a unique way.

This is not to say that people stigmatized and diagnosed with a mythical mental illness do not exhibit aberrant and irrational behavior. Only those persons of very low intelligence confuse the literal and metaphorical. It was as late as 1973 that those with a homosexual orientation were listed in the DSM as having a mental illness. Just because someone exhibits abnormal behavior does not mean that they have mental illness. What exactly is the putative mental illness that allegedly forces a homeless person to be dangerous?

To emphasize, putative mental illnesses are not listed in standard textbooks on pathology because they are diagnosed based on unreliable symptoms, not objective signs. As such as such, mental illnesses do not meet the nosological criteria for disease classification in standard textbooks on pathology.

Stare decisis rulings underscore the fact that civil commitments, while they may serve legitimate state interests like public safety and providing care to those unable to care for themselves (parens patriae), must be balanced with the individual's fundamental right to liberty. The courts have established due-process safeguards to protect this liberty interest, requiring states to demonstrate a compelling justification for involuntary confinement, typically involving both a mental illness and a showing of dangerousness, using clear and convincing evidence.

That ruling significantly curtailed the ability of states to commit individuals based solely on a diagnosis of mental illness without proof of dangerousness.

In sum, state and federal legislative bodies must stop involuntary commitment procedures among the innocent in order to protect our right to liberty and due process of law.

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Jeffrey A. Schaler, Ph.D., M.Ed., is a psychologist and retired professor at American University’s Department of Justice, Law and Society; and Johns Hopkins University’s psychology faculty. He continues his work of over 50 years as an existential psychoanalyst in private practice. He now lives in Pompton Plains, NJ, with his service dog named “Blue,” a purebred Black Labrador. Schaler’s wife of 38 years, Dr. Renee Royak-Schaler, died suddenly in 2011.

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Click this link to read the full article in The American Spectator.

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By

Jeffrey A. Schaler, PhD

One thing Trump supporters seem to consistently avoid is the effect their adulation of Trump is having on our young citizens.

When Bill Clinton was president, and lied about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, he also claimed that oral sex was not sex. That story broke in The Washington Post on January 21, 1998. Ideas have consequences. The Washington Post later published a story on July 7, 1999, entitled “Parents Are Alarmed by an Unsettling New Fad in Middle Schools: Oral Sex.” That story and similar ones detailed as their writers asserted, a “new prevalence of oral sex.” Teenagers were copying, or as psychologists like to say, they were modeling the behavior of President Clinton.

This was disturbing to many parents for obvious reasons. Sexually transmitted diseases can still be transmitted via oral sex. Since intercourse was morally prohibited, kids found a way around that prohibition, thanks to the President of the United States.

Each president has an effect on generations of the day.

What do you think President Trump is teaching young people today about how to live, how to behave?

Modeling has been studied by psychologists for many years now. Stanford Professor of Psychology Emeritus Albert Bandura has done extensive work on what he calls social cognitive theory. It is a fact that people copy the behaviors of powerful others, that is those who are considered important to others for reasons that are important to them. Parents, for example, are the most important models in a child’s life. Outside of the family, rock stars, athletes, law enforcement officers and of course the president are important role models for children and adults, but especially children. If someone is important to a parent, that same person can be a role model for the parent’s children, vicariously. Again, the most important factor in terms of whether a behavior will be copied is whether the other is important to a child in some way.

The example set is the lesson learned. Words a parent or significant authority figure may utter are nowhere near as meaningful to a child as the behaviors exhibited. If a parent tells his children that lying is wrong, and the parent is caught lying, that is the lesson learned. The parent tells his child not to lie, the parent lies, his child copies the parent and lies. The “should” is irrelevant. It is what the parent does, how he behaves, that counts.

The salient behaviors of significant others are the ones children focus on. The same is true when it comes to adults in relation to other adults. The example set is the lesson learned. Period.

One doesn’t have to be a psychologist to understand where I am going with this from a political point of view. What are some of the more salient features of the most powerful person in the world today’s behavior, that is, President Donald Trump?

Lying.

Whether one likes his policies or not, both sides of the congressional aisle admit that Trump is a chronic liar. Some refer to him as a pathological liar. I believe this is one behavior young people will model.

What are others? I believe children will model his utter disregard for the rule of law, just as Trump and his followers have done. Trump’s incredibly manipulative behavior is another. He claims to be a friend of Israel, but it is clear he does that only to garner votes. Young people notice how he not only says he will punish those who criticize and disagree with him, he follows through on his threats. Young people may not understand this during the early teenage years, however, their parents undoubtedly talk about it. They learn. Look how Trump claims to be a pacifist on the one hand. Then, on the other he threatens incredible military violence when he does not get his way. He was convicted of 34 felonies. He and his cohorts disregard the seriousness of his having committed those felonies. What effect do you think his denial will have on young people.

In my opinion, perhaps the worst is that Trump exhibits little to no empathy in relation to others. His greatest follower was “the richest person in the world,” Elon Musk, who believed that empathy, or caring about other people, is destroying society. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit…Empathy has been “weaponized,” according to Musk.

There is plenty of evidence to support the idea that Trump is a racist, an anti-semite, xenophobe, homophobic, anti-trans, and anti-Muslim. According to those who know him well, Trump does not read, he is misogynistic, sexually abusive, and unfaithful to his wife, Melania. These are established facts. So is Mr. Trump’s denial. So are his conspiracy theories.

His absence of empathy is what nearly all psychologists, psychiatrists and others in the mental health professions say characterizes psychopaths and sociopaths.

Is this who you want your children and grandchildren to become?

The main criticism of Republicans’ “big beautiful bill” is that it shows no empathy toward those in need. As young people realize these characteristics of their president, they come to realize that is what it takes to get admiration from others, to become president. Children model those behaviors.

Psychologists and lay persons alike assert that Trump is narcissistic. This means that he expresses, at the expense of others, an excessive preoccupation with himself, an exaggerated sense of self-importance (“a legend in his own mind”), a constant desire for admiration and attention, highly manipulative behavior, a sense of entitlement, and extreme difficulty handling criticism. Throughout these salient features is the false sense of bravado we have come to know so well about President Trump.

To be sure, Trump is an entertaining character and this may account for his popularity. It is not that Trump attracts attention because he is brilliant or clever. He attracts attention because he is socially deviant, he is a character. And as Harvey Keitel said towards the end of Quentin Tarantino’s movie Pulp Fiction, “just because you are a character does not mean that you have character.” In my opinion, a good president must exhibit good morality, or admirable character. He or she must be a good person, exhibit strong integrity or “honesty among parts.” He or she must be a good person, express sincere humility, and be considered a good parent, and a courageous person.

If you read or listen to the news, you know how fragile Trump’s ego is. He likes to play a tough guy, a bully, but he is extremely thin-skinned. He threatens and punishes anyone who criticizes or disagrees with him. That is a sign of moral weakness, not strength.

One does not need to be a psychologist to understand the psychological defense mechanism known as “projection.” News anchors use the term freely. When a person refuses to take responsibility for parts of himself he does not want to admit exist, parts he believes are inconsistent with his self-concept, that is, the way he wants to be seen, he attributes these qualities to his environment. He tries to disown these qualities and asserts they are true about his critics, people he doesn’t like. Any good psychoanalyst knows that a client who resists taking responsibility for his projections is emotionally and psychologically unstable.

Are these the characteristics you want to see in your children and grandchildren? Are these the characteristics you want to see in our next generations?

If President Clinton’s behavior influenced that of young people in 1998, as suggested by The Washington Post poll and story, consistent with Bandura’s studies of social cognitive theory, it is reasonable to expect an increase in lying and general disregard for the law as young people attempt to copy President Trump’s behavior. Parents who don’t want to admit this are simply teaching their children about denial. This is simply one other reason why the moral caliber of our president has important consequences for our young people, and future generations.

During the Clinton campaigns, the mantras were “it’s the economy, stupid.” In the Trump era, perhaps the motto should be “it’s the morality, stupid.”

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Sarbin, T. R. (1990). Toward the Obsolescence of the Schizophrenia Hypothesis, Journal of Mind and Behavior, 11(3-4), 259–283.

Abstract

The disease construction of schizophrenia is no longer tenable. That construction originated during a period of rapid growth of biological science based on mechanistic principles. Crude diagnostic measures failed to differentiate absurd, unwanted conduct due to biological conditions from atypical conduct directed to solving existential or identity problems. The construction was communicated - in the absence of solid evidence - by medical practitioners by means of symbolic, rhetorical, and organizational acts. The patient came to be regarded as an object without agency or goals. In spite of enormous research funding, no biological or psychological marker has been discovered that would differentiate diagnosed schizophrenics from normals without creating unacceptable proportions of false positives and false negatives. Employing a moral category, "unwanted conduct," as a criterion, and tacitly transforming moral judgments to the medical category, schizophrenia, leads to the use of schizophrenia/nonschizophrenia as the independent variable in research designs. The failure of eight decades of research to produce a reliable marker leads to the conclusion that schizophrenia is an obsolescent hypothesis and should be abandoned.

Other Works by Theodore Sarbin can be found at https://philpapers.org/s/Theodore%20Sarbin

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Trump’s Police State

It endangers all of us

ROBERT REICH

JUN 09, 2025

Friends,

Now that Trump’s tariffs have been halted, his One Big Beautiful Bill has been stymied, and his multibillionaire tech bro has turned on him, how does he demonstrate his power?

On Friday morning, federal agents from ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Drug Enforcement Administration conducted raids across Los Angeles, including at two Home Depots, a doughnut shop, and a clothing wholesaler, in search of workers they suspected of being undocumented immigrants.

They arrested 121 people.

They were met with protesters who chanted and threw eggs before being dispersed by police wearing riot gear, holding shields, and using batons, guns that shot pepper balls, rubber bullets, tear gas, and flash bang grenades against the protesters.

On Saturday, Trump intentionally escalated the confrontations, ordering at least 2,000 National Guard troops to be deployed in Los Angeles County to help quell the protests.

He said that any demonstration that got in the way of immigration officials would be considered a “form of rebellion.” Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, called the protests an “Insurrection.”

Saturday evening, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threatened to deploy active-duty Marines, saying, “The violent mob assaults on ICE and Federal Law Enforcement are designed to prevent the removal of Criminal Illegal Aliens from our soil. A dangerous invasion facilitated by criminal cartels (aka Foreign Terrorist Organizations) and a huge NATIONAL SECURITY RISK. Under President Trump, violence and destruction against federal agents and federal facilities will NOT be tolerated.”

Friends, we are witnessing the first stages of Trump’s police state.

Last week, raids in San Diego and Massachusetts — in Martha’s Vineyard and the Berkshires — led to standoffs as bystanders angrily confronted federal agents who were taking workers into custody.

Trump’s dragnet also includes federal courthouses. ICE officers are mobilizing outside courtrooms across America and are immediately arresting people — even migrants whose cases have been dismissed by judges.

History shows that once an authoritarian ruler establishes the infrastructure of a police state, that same infrastructure can be turned on anyone.

Trump is rapidly creating such an infrastructure:

(1) declaring an emergency on the basis of a so-called “rebellion,” “insurrection,” or “invasion,”

(2) using that “emergency” to justify bringing in federal agents with a monopoly of force (ICE, DHS, FBI, DEA, and National Guard) against civilians inside the nation,

(3) allowing those militarized agents to make dragnet abductions and warrantless arrests and detain people without due process,

(4) creating additional prison space and detention camps for those detained, and

(5) eventually, as the situation escalates, declaring martial law.

We are not at martial law yet, thankfully. But once in place, the infrastructure of a police state can build on itself. Those who are given authority over aspects of it — the internal militia, dragnets, detention camps, and martial law — seek other opportunities to invoke their authority.

As civilian control gives way to military control, the nation splits into those who are most vulnerable to it and those who support it. The dictatorship entrenches itself by fomenting fear and anger on both sides.

Right now, our major bulwarks against Trump’s police state are the federal courts and broad-based peaceful protests — such as the one that many of us will engage in this coming Saturday, June 14, on the No Kings Day of Action (information here).

If you are in the National Guard or active-duty military and you believe you are being ordered to violate the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens, I urge you to call the GI Rights Hotline for advice and support, at 877-447-4487.

It is imperative that we remain peaceful, that we demonstrate our resolve to combat this tyranny but do so nonviolently, and that we let America know about the emerging infrastructure of Trump’s police state and the importance of resisting it.

These are frightening and depressing times. But remember: Although it takes one authoritarian to establish a police state, it takes just 3.5 percent of a population to topple him and end it.

October 8, 1985

By Jeffrey A. Schaler

Years ago one of my clients, a therapist herself, described her past experience with an analyst to me. At a regular point in their sessions the analyst would ask if she was "ready," close the curtains, place the couch cushions on the floor, and the two would engage in sexual intercourse.

"Why did you stop your 'work' with this man?" I asked.

"He raised his fees," she replied.

Sound shocking and unusual? It happens too often. Crimes committed like this and crimes brought to public attention, let alone specific persons prosecuted, are not exactly correlated. Calling it taboo just isn't enough.

The motives and desires of therapists, and I use the term broadly here to include social workers, psychiatrists, counselors and psychologists, are a marvel to behold. Credentials and licensing have little to do with guaranteeing the rights and protection of the consumer. Impressive credentials may be used to further the cause of psychological damage. Licensing procedures and restrictions are also designed to guarantee and protect the exclusivity and monopoly of member professionals. Therapists are businesspersons conducting a business to make money, which is too often hidden under the myth of care and concern for public welfare.

In my opinion the quality of therapy offered to the public is quite low. Too often people give therapists too much power. The fact of the matter is that therapists are just like everyone else . . . only more so.

Therapists like to think of themselves as being very important. They frequently like to pretend to be more than human.

Among therapists, Freud is generally regarded as the great father. And Freud subscribed to a high ideal that most human beings he had come across departed from most lamentably. As he states in "Psychoanalysis and Faith": "I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash . . ." Freud had a lot of influence.

Founders of specific schools of therapy have always surrounded themselves with ex-clients who have become disciples and colleagues. Sibling rivalry is ferocious.

An eminent psychiatrist spoke honestly this past spring during his keynote address at a conference when he said he wasn't sure whether he was healing souls or soling heels.

There are female therapists who sexually seduce female patients. There are male therapists who sexually seduce male patients. A psychiatrist pledges romantic love to his female patient and tells her that he will leave his wife for her. One patient after another.

There are depths to therapy, from problem-solving to values clarification. There are many well intentioned therapists with bad advice. They can make a bad situation worse and wreck a marriage.

Therapy is at times like marriage. Our unrealistic expectations about what it can provide are a lot like waiting for Godot. And yet, therapy can be so essential, so valuable.

I believe that when good therapy goes well, a person confronts four basic existential issues: death, freedom, isolation and meaning. Perhaps this is what Freud meant when he claimed to cure the miseries of the neurotic only to open him up to the normal misery of life. Therapists are people struggling with these problems too -- all of the time. Some have pathetic means of coping, others heroic.

It is at this point that I believe therapy and philosophy interface. Investigations concerning the origin of the moral imperative necessarily lead us to the "big picture." I think it is important to find out a bit about a therapist's weltanschauung, or world view.

The stigma of therapy comes from the perpetuation of the disease model mentality of its practitioners. This keeps away a lot of people in need. One way of coping with something a therapist doesn't understand is to label and categorize it. This eases the existential anxiety of not knowing. People who act as if they understand when they don't make me feel nervous. Too many therapists don't know that they don't know.

Perhaps therapy needs a warning alongside of its advertised joy, cure, increased self-esteem, integration, etc. Ernest Becker suggested in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Denial of Death" that the warning read: "Danger: real probability of the awakening of terror and dread, from which there is no turning back."

The facts are these: therapy can be an exercise in impotence. It can make you more confused, be a tremendous waste of time, energy and money, in addition to creating an opportunity lost. Therapy can be lousy for kids, aggravating to a marriage, abusive, humiliating and masochistic. You can be taken advantage of intellectually, emotionally and physically by completely legitimate therapists. You can be hypnotized, brainwashed and just plain deadened by the experience. All in the name of being for your own good.

Trying to find the right therapist can be like trying to locate the pronoun "I" in the center of your brain . . . There's no place like home. There's no place like home . . .

And a therapist can help a person discover tremendous courage and meaning in life.

The words of the Jewish scholar Heschel remind me of the true task of therapy: to comfort the troubled and trouble the comfortable.

Good therapy for comfortable therapists ought to be troubling them.

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Schiff’s arguably undemocratic and unfair political behavior may be due to political motives (he is in a district that he regularly wins by huge margins and may even have a majority of House members supporting him), but “mental illness” has nothing to do with aberrant behavior, if indeed his is.

Click this link Don't Blame Mental Illness to read the entire article posted on Spectator.org on October 1, 2019.

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Click the link below to read the full commentary posted on MarylandReporter.com on September 28, 2021

https://marylandreporter.com/2021/09/28/competency-to-stand-trial-and-the-mother-who-killed-her-children/

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by Jeffrey A. Schaler and Richard E. Vatz

Spectators.org July 22, 2024

Please, no more searches for the motives of this miserable miscreant. Unless he is tied to unsavory groups or countries, he’s not worth anyone’s time.

It seems every news report we have received in the last few days has referenced the search for the unknown “motive(s)” for Thomas Crooks’ trying to assassinate former President Donald Trump, an effort which injured the former president and also killed and injured innocent bystanders.

Thomas Matthew Crooks … was a miserable self-obsessed loner who had some history of supporting Republicans and progressives. When it comes to explaining upsetting events, people abhor a vacuum.

Why do people want to know so desperately why something like this happened? Because they think that the more accurately they can explain why something happened, the more accurately they can predict when and why it might happen again and ultimately control and prevent its reoccurrence. (READ MORE from Schaler and Vatz: Don’t Blame ‘Mental Illness’ for Mass Murder and Political Missteps)

We have been writing on the fruitless search for “motives” of miscreants for decades, and here is what we have found:

1. Specific motives are more often than not simply unknowable. Moreover, it doesn’t matter, in this case, whether Crooks was left-wing or right wing (evidence exists that he was conflicted), and when they are ascertainable, so what? John Hinckley is believed to have tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan to impress Jodie Foster, a person who never knew him, and given her sexual orientation would not have been interested in him regardless. Mark David Chapman, who murdered John Lennon, said he did so due to an alleged personal resentment against Mr. Lennon and a desire to emulate Holden Caulfied of the novel The Catcher in the Rye.

They were just two insignificant people until they tried (or succeeded) to kill important people.

2. Knowing a motive doesn’t matter because motives do not tell you who is going to try and kill someone. Everyone can be seen to have a motive to kill. Moreover, we cannot deprive a person of liberty or responsibility simply because we believe they are going to commit a crime. We have in our admittedly lengthy professional lives known many bizarre people, some of whom seemed capable of violence, but there is no way to predict who will be violent except by previous or ongoing behavior. Shall we start putting loners and “weird” people in protective custody for their own good and public safety?

3. People who murder famous people are usually utterly uninteresting people, “nobodies,” who gain salience with society-at-large only one way: taking the life of an important person that makes them famous. And unfortunately, thanks to media sensationalism, they are right. We label murderers like Crooks as having an “existential” motive. Killing another gives the murderer a sense of meaning in his or her otherwise empty life.

Probable Motive

That is the likely motive in this case. Thomas Matthew Crooks, often now identified by his full name like Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray and others, bespeaking their new-found assigned significance, was a miserable self-obsessed loner who had some history of supporting Republicans and progressives.

Was he an ideologue? There is no evidence of it. He was friendless and bullied, but millions of people in this country are friendless and bullied … very few kill people and try to kill famous people.

Did he expect to live? No way of knowing, but by killing former President Trump he would likely have the existential significance of being known well and reviled by people who otherwise wouldn’t give him the time of day.

There is no way in a country of 340 million people to prevent such attempts at violence from those who cannot be successful at anything else, but who think that people now will have to “know me.”

Those committed to assassination prevention know that family or others’ providing the means for such miserable criminal-but-otherwise-nothings to murder others obviously can facilitate the acts themselves. That is an avenue the criminal justice system should pursue. (READ MORE: Lies, Damned Lies, and Mass Shooting Statistics)

Please, though, no more searches for the motives of this miserable miscreant. Unless investigators find unknown ties to unsavory groups or countries, he is not worth anyone’s time.

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Jeffrey A. Ph.D. M.Ed., (ijas@me.com) is a psychologist and a retired professor of Justice, Law and Society at American University’s School of Public Affairs, and a retired member of the psychology faculty at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Schaler supervises existentially-oriented psychoanalysts and lives in Ellicott City, Md. Cell: 240-460-0987

Richard E. Vatz (rvatz@Towson.edu), Ph.D. is former psychology editor of USA Today Magazine. He is a retired Towson University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Rhetoric and Communication. Cell 443-801-1281

https://www.cato-unbound.org/print-issue/106/

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A person pays respects outside the scene of a mass shooting at a supermarket, in Buffalo, New York, on Sunday. In all, 13 people were shot and 10 killed. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

By JEFFREY A. SCHALER and RICHARD E. VATZ

On Friday, 21 people were shot in three separate incidents in Milwaukee after a Bucks’ playoff game. On Saturday, police say a hate-filled teen-age racist massacred 10 citizens in Buffalo, New York. On Sunday, six people were injured and one killed in a mass shooting at a church in Laguna Woods, California.

These outrages call unmistakably for the death penalty, particularly for the perpetrator of the New York shootings. The suspect’s intention, outlined in a lengthy manifesto posted online, was clear. The act, which police say he livestreamed, is also clear. Given these facts, there is no reasonable doubt about whether this 18-year-old man is guilty. He did it; he must pay for his acts. But, most important of all, the public must be protected from him and his kind.

Surely, this is an example of evil personified. The trigger may have been his nauseating racism, but he enjoyed killing.

Police say the suspect fired indiscriminately in a supermarket, injuring 13 people, killing 10 of them. According to one eye-witness account cited in news reports, the shooter “was laughing while he was being arrested.” Clearly, there is no remorse, no contrition. And, of course, there were the requisite friends who said they could never imagine that such a “normal guy” could do such a thing.

That and related sentiments are irrelevant. It doesn’t matter why he did it.

What then must we do?

Many criminal justice experts often assert that the classic purposes of punishment include deterrence, rehabilitation, incapacitation and retribution, yet some who are averse to capital punishment reference only — or predominantly — rehabilitation. The bottom line is that the public must be protected from these monsters. The public needs to see that the most awful, inexplicably terrorizing capital crimes will lead to the elimination of the perpetrators. That is the least we can do for their victims and future victims.

Yet, in many states, such as New York and Maryland, the death penalty has been abolished.

Perhaps some genius wordsmith can articulate for some gullible audience why the current murderous rampage should not warrant the death penalty. The usual objection is reasonable doubt. There is no doubt in the current case that this person did it.

And spare us the arguments of mental health experts — too many of whom are consistently eager to label( and testify for) anyone who was sent to get psychiatric help as “mentally ill” and therefore either cognitively not able to understand the nature of what he or she has done or volitionally unable to control his or her behavior. Clearly, those are both deceptions, what the late scholar Lon Fuller referred to as “legal fiction.” The scientific and statistical truth is that we cannot know who will harm self and others with an accuracy beyond that expected by chance. If they did it before, they can do it again. There should be no second chances.

Some yearn, as they surely will in the Buffalo case, for the mental illness excuse to eliminate criminal responsibility in all possible cases. Has the perpetrator seen mental health professionals; has he been labelled as “mentally ill;” has he got a psychiatrist who says he was delusional? No matter. All perpetrators have human agency. Why did he do it? Because he wanted to kill.

The suspected shooter has been charged with first degree murder to which he has pleaded “not guilty.”

The legal elements necessary to establish guilt and responsibility are well estblished, however: mens rea (the intention to commit the crime) and actus reus (the criminal act). The premeditation of this atrocity also is well-established. The gunman loaded up to protect himself and record his actions for the ages by live-streaming his massacre and wearing body armor to render useless the brave security guard who fired a shot in self-defense. That and similar behavior constitute criminal intent.

Society must stand up and show its complete contempt and rejection for the Buffalo mass murderer. We must protect ourselves from these killers clearly lacking a conscience, not pathologically, but socially. He should be, but won’t be, executed. Shame on New York, which does not have the option of putting him to death but which will house him for decades. This man has forfeited his right to live by intentionally and premeditatedly mowing down over a dozen citizens.

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Richard E. Vatz (rvatz@Towson.edu) is psychology editor of USA Today Magazine and political persuasion professor at Towson University. Jeffrey Alfred Schaler (ijas@icloud.com) Is a retired professor of Justice, Law and Society at American University’s School of Public Affairs, and a retired member of the psychology faculty at Johns Hopkins University. They are co-editors of “Thomas S. Szasz: the Man and His Ideas” (Transaction and Routledge, London, 2017) and authors of many pieces on psychiatry and the law.

Originally Published The Baltimore Sun: May 16, 2022