We need not use the word megalomania when speaking of The Rump. It’s a given. Little Donald defines the word.

He is far from being the only one suffering from that malady. Some actually believe they are special. However, most are desperate souls that, deep down, know it isn’t true but have to keep saying it, to themselves and others, because of their dread of being less than everyone else.

The latter are people who see only two possibilities: special or worthless. Given the passion, desperation and constancy of The Rump’s protestations, he seems definitely to be a member of that group.

I promise to get to the more interesting part of today’s sermon, but first I need to resort to that old public speakers’ trick. So, let’s start off with a joke, known to most of you as Donald Trump.

Few people go around shouting, “I’m smart.” The smart ones have no need to embarrass themselves so. But The Rump goes far beyond. He proclaims, “I am smart; very, very smart.” Otherwise, we certainly wouldn’t know it by his results. It must take an unusual degree of incompetence to bankrupt a casino.

Give him credit, though. He did learn the trick of letting others use his name, charging a lot for the privilege, getting lots of personal media attention (his Poor Johnny-One-Note form of marketing) and leaving his “partners” shouldering the losses in bankruptcy court.

Here is a guy who must plaster his name everywhere. Notice his plans for the White House. Then there is the Trump Washington Monument. Those 747s are just about large enough for his emblazoned name. Air Farce One. Can Trump Rushmore be far behind?

The root for this need to be larger than life can probably be explained by his obsession with building skyscrapers. He definitely puts a great deal of focus into towers. This is reinforced by the biggest and best golf course, house, etc. If I recall, the technical, applicable term here is phallic symbols. Is it possible he’s the first male to have penis envy?

The Donald said that if Obama released his birth certificate, he would provide his financial disclosure. While he claims various numbers, most commonly around $2.7 billion, financial analysts usually tag him at around $700 million, at most. Does that explain why he reneged on his promise?

He claimed he wanted to get past the birther sideshow, so he could get to the real problems we face. We got past the birther nonsense. What’s the first big issue he expounds on? Obama’s grades. How could a poor student get into Columbia and Harvard?

I’m wondering how a magna cum laude student and President of the Harvard Law Review gets classified as a poor student. If The Rump really wants to know how a poor student gets into Harvard, he might ask his son-in-law. His son-in-law’s daddy forked over a few million. That’s probably how Obama got in too.

I’m sure you’ve heard how upset he is that China is making “American products,” whatever they are. The Donald has several product lines. For some reason they all bear the name Trump. Probably the most prominent is his line of men’s clothing. They are made in China. Who woulda guessed?

I just heard today about his lying about his good fortune of not getting drafted into the Vietnam War. He said he lucked out and got a high lottery number. No. He got 4 academic deferments and, being the great athlete he has told us he was back then, was able to get a medical deferment, without an exam. But that’s okay – he’s a great patriot – he’s told us so, many, many times.

Although he’s flipped on every issue likely to be on the agenda this cycle, we can conclude that he is pro capitalism . . . when it benefits him.

Everyone agrees that capitalism is based on greed. It’s just that not everyone agrees that’s an unalloyed virtue. What is greed’s handmaiden? Self-interest. One might call it self-importance, egoism, one of the seven deadly sins. Pride is another of the deadlies, a constant sidekick. No one has ever successfully explained how someone can be a capitalist and a Christian. That’s like being a celibate and a whoremonger.

The “invisible hand” that is supposed to make the nonexistent “free market” work, being based on greed and self-interest, guarantees economic bubbles. The things that follow bubbles are what economists call recessions or depressions or crises or panics.

Since these bubbles and the events that follow them are inescapable consequences of that greed and self-interest, it seems quite a stretch to claim that an invisible hand is the benign benefactor at the very core of that particular economic system. Our great grandchildren will consider us gullible dullards for opting for such a ridiculous credo.

Those who devote themselves to such a joke have an inhuman, inhumane set of priorities. It is all about them, first, last, always. Geldt is the only measure of a man.

Given that it can only satisfy the egotistical, gullible dullards, it’s difficult to credit their claims of superior intelligence. All they have to offer as proof is wealth. There are a multitude of better measures of a man.

The very traits that bring people to their worship of capitalism and wealth, greed and self-importance, are attributes that are off-putting in healthy relationships. Someone holding the same values could, of course, find that acceptable, or even appealing.

One of these self-proclaimed special people, David Learah, former head of the National Association of Realtors, wrote a book entitled, Why the Real Estate Boom Will Not Bust – And How You Can Profit From It. The book was well-received by his peers and the public. What a smart (read: wealthy) guy. It was so generous of him to share his secrets of wealth with us – less than 2 years before the crash; the crash that couldn’t happen.

From the divinities on high, Greenspan et al., on down, there were so many of these geniuses pontificating in books, magazine articles, speeches, reassuring congressional testimony and such, that David was almost lost in that cloud of hubris.

Don’t get me wrong. These guys are not completely stupid. They either are gullible enough to accept the fanciful or just too intellectually lazy to deal with the complexities of the real world. These people are smart enough to invest a bit of their abundance in buying politicians, getting much of the laws and regulations written to their liking or getting regulators to look the other way.

In their avarice and contempt for the populace, they have so distorted our economy as to make any possible recovery a long way down the road. Born in the misery of the Great Depression, I am apparently fated to end in a similar clime. What a set of bookends.

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Who do you trust? John Belushi got it right. Most academics get it wrong.

Everyone in academia knows just what a symposium is. At least they think they know. Have you read Plato’s Dialogues? One was named Symposium. Yes, the Greeks had a word for it: a drunken party. I could have heard much more intelligent talk at an Animal House toga party than I heard at a medical symposium held at Vanderbilt University.

Just remember, these are the people into whose hands you put your health, well-being and life. Take no aspirin and call me in the morning.

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Drug companies claim they test their products. Sometimes that may be true. For psychopharmaceuticals it is a baldfaced lie.

You want to paint your living room. You can’t decide between beige and blue. One way to make up your mind would be to apply a few strokes of beige on one wall and a few strokes of blue on one of the other walls.

Just stand back and look at the beige. Try to imagine how the room would look. Then do the same for the blue. You now have tested both colors.

But, suppose that, for some unfathomable reason, you mix the two colors together instead and then you paint a few strokes of the concoction on one of the walls. You have not tested either beige or blue.

Eli Lilly apparently had a good premonition of what some of the side effects they could expect might be when they tested Prozac. They found a way to minimize those side effects. Old Eli required that everyone taking Prozac also take a second little pill: benzodiazepine. You might know it better by another name: Valium.

By mixing the two, as with mixing beige and blue, neither the Prozac nor the Valium was really tested. This, however, failed to deter Mr. Lilly. His public relations minions touted Prozac as the most tested drug in history.

Prozac was never tested. Eli Lilly says Prozac is the most tested drug. Black is white, up is down and the drug companies care about you.

In actual fact, Eli Lilly never tested Prozac itself. A double-blind study is required when comparing a drug against a placebo. That’s the scientific way.

But, the drug companies allow those conducting the study to break the blind if a patient is having a bad reaction and they suspect that the reaction is caused by the drug.

If the patient is on the drug, he is switched to the placebo pool. This removes those bad reactions from the group taking the drug and adds them to the group taking the placebo, making the former look better and the latter look worse. Good public relations but not good science. Good for Eli Lilly but not for us.

Have you been tested for that famous chemical imbalance? I certainly hope not. The only tests they have for serotonin levels and that of the other monoamines are only done postmortem. Those studies prove that there is no relationship between the levels of those chemicals and any mental illness. If someone tells you that you have a chemical imbalance, he is simply ignorant of the facts and repeating the marketing mantra of those who want you to purchase their chemicals.

Because science did not know the cause of mental illness, more prescriptions are written for antidepressants than any other class of drugs. Well, it’s time for a plug for my book, Why Are You Mad?

While Eli Lilly and the other manufacturers never scientifically tested Prozac and its siblings, others did. Compiling the results of studies from governments and universities around the world, what do we find? We find that every psychopharmaceutical damages the brain. We also find that no drug in these categories work as well as a placebo.

Science or marketing; that your pick.

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Warning! This is a long one. I have been so busy putting this site together and getting ready for a trip, that I cheated. Wanting to put up something worth your time, I took an except from my book and adapted it. It is 6-7 pages long in that format.

Ask every physician you know to define this common word. Ask every attorney you know. Did you, perchance, find some disagreement? Did you encounter some confusion? I guarantee some of your sources will have experienced difficulty in providing you with an understandable, comprehensive definition.

The odds are that not one member of either group will know how to use this word correctly. Why? The members of these professions are trained in their respective disciplines.

Insanity is not a legal term. It is not a medical term. Their use, or rather, their misuse of this term follows from their assumption that the word falls within the jurisdiction of their specific academic discipline.

Insanity originated as a political term. The meaning is quite simple and straightforward. Insanity is the inability to function in an acceptable manner in a given society.

Before getting too deeply involved in this particular subject, it may be necessary to clarify a point. The following addresses the formal use of the term insanity. I am fully aware that it is used differently, much more broadly, informally. But, as Blacks would be offended by others using the word nigger while using it freely amongst themselves, those with mental illness use the term insane, and its variations and alternatives, among themselves but find it offensive when directed at them by others.

If our society considered it acceptable to kill and eat teenage boys, Jeffrey Dahmer would have been sane. Our society does not; he was not.

The system of jurisprudence would, or should, be bound to determine a person sane or insane, as regards a particular act, based upon the determination of society’s acceptance, not upon some static principle peculiar to the legal profession. The question of his ability to function in an acceptable manner is another matter.

Psychiatrists have no warrant to confine a person to an asylum if she or he is functioning in a manner within the acceptable norms of the community. The medical profession has no authority to stigmatize a particular behavior as insane unmindful of whether it is acceptable to the society. Despite their professional presumptions, society defines what is acceptable and unacceptable, what is sane and nsane.

Although behavior is a concern of the law and occasionally medicine, both professions are dependent upon the society in this matter. If such a decision is a matter for the society or community, it is a political question. The fact that the behaviors we are considering are those of individuals suggests the need to address the matter beyond the scope of the society. The above definition encompasses this need.

There is a criminal court judge with whom I have had a social relationship for more than two decades. A recent discussion with him could only be described as Kafkaesque. The subjects were insanity and mental illness.

Reasonably well-educated, at least in the forms and minutiae of his profession, he could not grasp the simplest concepts of the subjects at hand.

Having been a full-fledged member of that dubious fraternity, I have firsthand knowledge that hubris is endemic among our public servants. But it was with a weird combination of amusement and distress that I listened to the unappreciated confusion which was the basis for his judgments on these matters.

Even after another attempt to delineate the differences between insanity and mental illness in the most elemental fashion, I was faced with the statement that, “Anyone who commits a crime is mentally ill.” I regret not asking him why he didn’t find every criminal coming before his bench ‘not guilty by reason of insanity.’

If everyone shares the same classification, that classification essentially loses all meaning. It is difficult to fathom how someone can admit of ignorance on these topics while maintaining such strongly held convictions about them. Of even more concern is when that person is in a position to control others, using his ignorance as the basis for his decisions.

I watched an interview on television related to the Washington, D.C. snipers. The interviewee was either a psychiatrist or a psychologist, a profiler, purportedly an expert on serial killers. One statement from this supposed expert floored me. In discussing a particular case, he said that it was obvious that the person was not mentally ill. Why? Because there was evidence that the crimes were planned.

While it’s true that people with mental illness might commonly be in a state that is disassociated from reality, with their ability to plan being impaired or nonexistent, to say that the presence of planning is proof that the person is not suffering from mental illness is evidence of the ‘expert’s’ ignorance, not of his untutored conclusion.

Maybe I gave him too much credit. It might have been that he didn’t consider one with mental illness intelligent enough to formulate a plan. If the ‘experts’ are so in thrall to the stigma, how much can we expect of laymen? Perhaps he was unaware that Winston Churchill was afflicted with mental illness or that he played some small role in the planning of World War II.

Insanity is not merely functioning in an unacceptable manner. It is the inability to function in an acceptable manner.

If a man is caught robbing a bank, our inclination is to assume that he made the decision while aware of the option not to rob the bank and was capable of following that option. If our assumption is correct, he is not insane; he is considered just a bad person.

The act may have been acceptable to him. Perhaps, that it was unacceptable to society meant less to him than his own judgment. The possibility of capture and punishment were insufficient deterrents. His judgment may have been bad. He may have been stupid. He may not fear punishment. He may not have expected to be caught. He may have been coerced.

Since we have assumed the ability to act differently, he is not considered insane. Robbing a bank is a serious act, often with serious consequences to the felon and/or others. If the cause were insanity, although just as serious, it would be another matter. In any case, however, it would be a serious act.

While on the criminal aspect of this subject, there is a matter that strikes me as somewhat confusing. Admittedly, I have not delved into this to any great extent but press coverage sometimes brings it to mind.

With some regularity, I hear the phrase, “competent to stand trial.” In the situations to which it relates, there is the consideration of the defendant’s sanity. We have had the recent spectacle of the trial of a woman accused of killing her five children. As with most spectacles,we are treated to more scintillation than substance.

We had the perfect example of lawyers and legislators presuming to know what they were doing. The law they created is the result of their confusion and ignorance. They reached back to the Britain of 1843 to include, and then to misapply, a standard meant for entirely different circumstances.

They blithely stand on a formulation that predates modern psychiatry. This standard pertains to a defendant being able to ‘know’ right from wrong. It has a place but is inappropriate and irrelevant to the subject of insanity.

The standard may properly be used to decide whether a child has reached a level of maturity to be able to distinguish right from wrong or fantasy from reality. It may also be needed to assess whether a person with Down’s Syndrome or Alzheimer’s has the capability to appreciate the differences between right and wrong. The standard has its place. It’s merely that that place is not in a law delineating insanity.

Why is it digressive? I defined insanity above and, referencing that definition, I fail to find any mention of an awareness, understanding or appreciation of right or wrong. Such a standard is not included as part of the definition of insanity because it has no place there.

As to the question of right and wrong, there are complexities when dealing with mental illness. During a psychotic episode, there are possibly factors which skew any reckoning of right and wrong. There may be a voice that one identifies as authoritative telling one to behave in some particular manner or to commit some specific act.

In various individuals, that authority could seem to be a god, the president, an agent of some clandestine government agency or some similar figure. There might seem to be a rationale that trumps normal behavioral codes. The act may appear, or the authority may confide, that it is necessary to save the nation from its enemies or the person, or their loved ones, from eternal damnation.

Did Saint Francis of Assisi know right from wrong? We named a city, San Francisco, after a man who ran through the streets of his home town completely naked and screaming. He was trying to get away from the voice of God.

Another factor to be considered is paranoia. This is common among those with mental illness, to a less dramatic extent, even when not experiencing a full-blown psychotic episode. Would you ask someone suffering from extreme paranoia to refrain from self-protection? One should be able to see that a perceived but delusory need for self-defense can disorient a person sufficiently to make a judgment of right and wrong differ from one made under more normal conditions.

Every sane person makes allowances for their standards of right and wrong to change. Every sane person accepts the fact that right and wrong can be situational. Were it not for such situational ethics, it would be difficult for a nation to find people willing to defend it. Were it not for situational ethics, the sale of handguns would not be a thriving business.

Thou shalt not kill is hardly treated as universally applicable or as an eternal constant, even by the most devout defenders of the faith. We find in the Bible that God resorted to situational ethics on those occasions when he commanded that certain people or groups of people be killed. King Saul was denied the honor of having the Messiah come from his lineage because he failed to obey a divine order to kill. He was punished for not killing.

If sane people are permitted to indulge in situational ethics and God sets an example in that vein, why are those with mental illness to be held to a different, more stringent standard?

Sane people can justify and are permitted, sometimes commanded, to kill under certain circumstances. It should not be difficult, therefore, to comprehend that people who know right from wrong but are experiencing a psychotic episode might see themselves as being in a situation that commands behavior that they might otherwise see as wrong.

Recall that insanity is a political term. Its boundaries are set by the society. Society may presume to determine right from wrong but, in a judicial setting, this question is not suitable for such simplification.

Using the McNaughton Standard of 1843 to determine whether a person appreciates right from wrong, is to place the ball in the defendant’s court. It becomes, not society’s standards, but the defendant’s understanding of right and wrong.

To use it as a criterion for sanity, means that the jury has to determine and use the defendant’s mind-set at the time of the commission of the crime. That would seem an exercise fraught with insurmountable difficulties, absent a Ouija board.

Insanity is insanity. It need not be elaborated upon, particularly by those ignorant of what it is. There is no need to strictly hold those who are insane to a standard which the sane are allowed to alter as they see fit.

It is only proper that the defendant should be competent to assist his attorney in his defense. I have no problem with delaying the trial in such instances until sanity can be assured. It seems, though, that sanity at the time of the criminal act usually is what evokes the question of competency at trial. Those are entirely different matters.

Insanity is commonly episodic. The phrase ‘temporary insanity’ is not, therefore, especially helpful and certainly is not descriptive of a rare state, as the media and the legal system routinely seem to suggest.

One could be insane at the time of the criminal act but not at trial. The reverse could also obtain. Obviously, either sanity or insanity could be in play at both times. As one’s state need not be the same at both times, sanity at trial should not determine the validity of a claim of insanity at the time of the act.

There does, however, seem to be a prejudice among jurors, encouraged by prosecutors, to deny the claim of insanity at the time of the act, if the defendant appears competent at trial. The term ‘temporary insanity’ has become a pejorative, comparable to ‘taking the Fifth.’

Let us now consider an act that is, to our society, of somewhat less moment. We would be hard-pressed to find someone who has never wanted to just roll over in the morning instead of getting up. We do not normally think of staying in bed as proof of being either bad or insane.

We do not expect the courts or physicians to become involved. If we do not go to work, we may lose some income or even our job but society at-large does not find it to be too serious an act; it certainly is not considered a crime. Is it insane, however?

There have been several periods in my past when the depressive phase of my manic-depression was so overwhelming as to make it impossible to leave my bed. Other than for quick trips to the bathroom and the refrigerator, I would remain in bed for two or three weeks.

Was I lazy? To those without an understanding of the nature and power of mental illness, and initially including myself, the answer was obviously yes. Just get up. Snap out of it.

As disruptive as it was to my life and that of my children, it was not a crime. It was not of major consequence to society, or even my physician. Was I lazy? No. Was I insane? Yes.

Even if I had not had the responsibility as a widower of raising two young children alone, society would not have considered my behavior acceptable. My employer didn’t. My parents didn’t. My friends didn’t.

Children and Family Services would not have approved, had they known, but, as the children were unharmed, it did not constitute a crime. Was I insane? My behavior was unacceptable. I had no ability to force myself to behave acceptably. Just get up? Would that be a reasonable demand of someone just out of heart surgery?

The disease eventually progressed, or abated, to the point where I was capable of behaving acceptably, i.e., getting out of bed. Was I insane? Yes. Was I dangerous? No. Am I usually insane? No. Is mental illness insanity? It may play a role in bringing about some episodes of insanity but, no, it is itself not insanity.

A person may have mental illness and be sane or insane. A person may be ‛normal’ as opposed to having a mental illness, and be sane or insane. Insanity, whether in one diagnosed with a mental illness or one otherwise without psychiatric problems, is usually episodic. It may be a single episode or it may recur
with varying degrees of frequency and severity. Mental illness and insanity are not interchangeable terms. Mental illness and dangerous are not synonymous. Even insane and dangerous have different meanings.

If you were not aware of the definitions and of their differences, don’t fret. At the time of the hearings on the sanity of Jeffrey Dahmer there was a national television interview show discussing this matter. The participants included two nationally-known psychologists and a professor of psychiatry from Columbia Medical School. During the entire hour all three used the term “seriously mentally ill” interchangeably
with the word insane.

Their misuse of the terms did not lead to any confusion on the part of the audience; it merely reinforced the audience’s misunderstanding. If those claiming expertise and holding positions of dominance in the system are so lacking in the most basic understanding of the words upon which their profession is based, we suffer as much from the system and its high priests as from the disease.

Misuse of the word insanity should stigmatize the user as confused or ignorant of the subject. It is probably advisable merely to ignore anyone using the words insanity and mental illness interchangeably, particularly those presenting themselves as ordained and pedigreed experts on the subjects.

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My own manic-depression fuels my interest in this subject. It led to many years of work in the field and resulted in a book, Why Are You Mad?

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