A First-Rate Madness

by Nassir Ghaemi

  237 “solved my biggest political problem”: Kessler, A Matter of Character, 54.

  238 one sign of creativity is “integrative complexity”: Simonton, Greatness, 80,

  238–239 “I would be at a press conference with him”: Tony Blair, A Journey: My Political Life (New York: Knopf, 2010), xiv.

  239 “No one was more shocked and angry than I”: Bush, Decision Points, 262.

  239 “I remembered the shattering pain of 9/11”: Ibid., 252.

  239 Santayana’s dictum that fanaticism: This view does not undermine my assertion that Bush was mentally healthy. I do not see fanaticism as a type of mental illness. It occurs most commonly, in fact, in the mental health of homoclites, who do not have much integrative complexity. Grinker’s work showed this possibility in his description of how homoclites were similar to “muscular Christianity.”

  240 Blair was a classic British amalgam: These pages on Blair draw mostly from his memoirs, and from Philip Stephens, Tony Blair: The Making of a World Leader (New York: Viking, 2004), 2–15.

  241 a major intellectual guide: Blair, A Journey, 80–81. John Burton and Eileen McCabe, We Don’t Do God: Blair’s Religious Belief and Its Consequences (London: Continuum, 2009), 4–8.

  242 “It was his manner that won us over”: Burton and McCabe, We Don’t Do God, 20.

  242 became Kinnock’s posse: Alastair Campbell, The Blair Years (New York: Knopf, 2004).

  242 likable persona and moderate politics: Stephens, Tony Blair.

  243 “Progress in Northern Ireland”: Campbell, The Blair Years, xxix.

  243 “Some indeed advocated this strategy”: Blair, My Journey, 349.

  244 “The other way, the way we chose”: Ibid.

  244 liberal imperialism of William Gladstone: Stephens, Tony Blair, 16.

  244 “We are interventionists”: Ibid., 215–219.

  244–245 “Who knows which [option] is right” . . . “All these years”: Blair, My Journey, 349.

  245 “The battle is not”: Ibid., 348.

  246 “Friends opposed to the war”: Ibid., 380.

  247 “The world provides sources”: Shelley E. Taylor and David A. Armor, “Positive Illusions and Coping with Adversity,” Journal of Personality 64 (1996): 873–898.

  249 “The difference between the TB of 1997”: Blair, My Journey, 651.

  250 “normal basic personality” . . . “mystical fatalism”: Jack El-Hai, “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist,” Scientific American, January 5, 2011, available at http://www.saloforum.com/index.php?threads/the-nazi-and-the-psychiatrist-goering-and-kelley.286/ (accessed May 1, 2011). Authors have previously wondered whether Kelley committed suicide because of his desperation in realizing how the Nazi horror happened at the hands of normal, ordinary men and thus could happen again anywhere, anytime. El-Hai, who has interviewed Kelley’s son and conducted new research, notes that Kelley had alcohol problems and that he killed himself impulsively while in the midst of an argument with his wife. His son believes that Kelley swallowed the cyanide pill by accident.

  250 Goering also had an IQ of 138: El-Hai, “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist.”

  250 “Your excellency Major Kelly!”: John Michael Steiner, Power Politics and Social Change in National Socialist Germany (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1976), 395. The original text of the letter is presented by Steiner in both English and German. The English translation begins, “Dear Major Kelly,” but the original German reads, “Sehr geehrter Major Kelly!” The literal translation for the German salutation is “Your excellency”; I’ve altered the English translation on this point to capture the respect in which the Nazi leaders held Dr. Kelley.

  250 the Rorschach tests of the Nazi leaders . . . A follow-up analysis: Barry A. Ritzler, “The Nuremberg Mind Revisited: A Quantitative Approach to Nazi Rorschachs,” Journal of Personality Assessment 42 (1978): 344–353. Molly Harrower, “Rorschach Records of the Nazi War Criminals: An Experimental Study After Thirty Years. Journal of Personality Assessment 40 (1976): 341–351.

  252 “I have yet to hear one of these men say”: Robert H. Jackson, That Man: An Insider’s Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 170.

  253 “You must not picture Professor Brandt as a criminal”: Robert Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 116–117.

  254 in prominent historical works on Hitler and the Nazis: John Lukacs, The Hitler of History (New York: Vintage, 1998).

  254 as historian Martin Kitchen describes well: Martin Kitchen, The Third Reich: Charisma and Community (London: Pearson Longman, 2008). Martin Kitchen, “Hitler Bewitcher or Hitler Bewitched?” in Creativity and Madness: An Interdisciplinary Symposium, ed. J. D. Keehn, 93–108 (York, ON: University Press of Canada, 1987).

  254 No Hitler, no Holocaust: Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler (New York: Random House, 1998), 348.

  CHAPTER 15. STIGMA AND POLITICS

  256 a deep cultural stigma accompanying mental illness: Paul Jay Fink and Allen Tasman, eds., Stigma and Mental Illness (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, 1992).

  256 physicians attach as much stigma: William R. Dubin and Paul Jay Fink, “Effects of Stigma on Psychiatric Treatment,” in Fink and Tasman, eds., Stigma and Mental Illness.

  256 Even mental health professionals: David Kingdon, Tonmoy Sharma, and Deborah Hart, “What Attitudes Do Psychiatrists Hold Towards People with Mental Illness?” Psychiatric Bulletin 29 (2004): 401–406.

  257 a “proud mediocrity”: Cesare Lombroso, The Man of Genius (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1891), 2.

  257 a “prejudice” of psychiatric “inferiority”: Ernst Kretschmer, The Psychology of Men of Genius (London: Kegan Paul; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1931), 6.

  257 “It shows Winston in a completely false light”: Lord David Owen, “Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt: Did Their Health Problems Impair Their Effectiveness as World Leaders?” Churchill Lecture Series, Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms, May 5, 2009, written transcript, 36.

  257 the Kennedy family criticized Nigel Hamilton’s . . . evidence: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nigel-hamilton/the-kennedys_b_810465.html (accessed February 27, 2011).

  257 Brendan Maher showed: Brendan Maher, “Delusional Thinking and Cognitive Disorder,” Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science 40 (2005): 136–146.

  258 mental heuristics and biases: Stuart Sutherland, Irrationality (London: Pinter and Martin, 2007).

  258 identified thirty-one standard irrational thought processes: http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/works/heuristicsandbiases.htm (accessed February 27, 2011).

  258 the unfortunate Missouri senator Thomas Eagleton: http://chipur.com/i-want-relief/thomas-eagleton-heartbeat-depressed-president/ (accessed February 27, 2011).

  259 “[Adviser David Axelrod] said to me”: Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson, The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election (New York: Penguin, 2009), 18.

  260 “Character above all”: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/character/ (accessed February 27, 2011).

  260 “And so, when I put my hand on the Bible”: http://www.4president.org/speeches/bushcheney2000convention.htm (accessed February 27, 2011).

  260 “With Bush, there was an instant change”: http://old.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/kessler200408090855.asp (accessed February 27, 2011).

  261 “Nobody died when Clinton lied”: http://www.nobodydied.com/ (accessed February 27, 2011).

  261 “Public virtue cannot exist”: John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren, Warren-Adams Letters (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1917), 22.

  261 “It’s my experience”: Abraham Lincoln, Marion Mills Miller, and Henry Clay Whitney, Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Presidential Addresses, 1859–1865 (New York: Current Literature Publishing Company, 1907), 282.

  264 “to form what, for lack of a better phrase”: Matthew Joseph Bruccoli and Scottie Fitzgerald S
mith, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 443.

  EPILOGUE

  266 the classic work of the psychologist Hans Eysenck: Hans Eysenck, The Psychology of Politics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954).

  266–267 Simonton . . . Westen . . . Lakoff: Dean Keith Simonton, Psychology, Science, and History: An Introduction to Historiometry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). Drew Westen, The Political Brain (New York: Public Affairs, 2007). George Lakoff, The Political Mind (New York: Viking, 2008).

  267 Michael Fellman in his biography of Sherman: Michael Fellman, Citizen Sherman: A Biography of William Tecumseh Sherman (New York: Random House, 1995).

  267 Joshua Shenk in his biography of Lincoln: Joshua Wolf Shenk, Lincoln’s Melancholy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

  267 does not mean that illness is nothing but a social construction: S. Nassir Ghaemi, The Rise and Fall of the Biopsychosocial Model: Reconciling Art and Science in Psychiatry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

  268 the claims of some postmodernist historians notwithstanding: For some of my debates with postmodernist oriented colleagues, see http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=4504, http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=4440 , and alien.dowling.edu/~cperring/aapp/bulletin_v_17_2/21.doc (accessed February 27, 2011).

  269 “split-brain” research: Michael Gazzaniga, Mind Matters: How Mind and Brain Interact to Create Our Conscious Lives (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988). In some epilepsies, where seizures do not respond well to medications, as a last resort a kind of surgery is sometimes used where the fibers, called the corpus callosum, connecting the right and left hemisphere are cut. After corpus callectomy, seizures that begin on one side of the brain at least do not travel to the other side, and full-blown convulsions are thus prevented. This kind of surgery began a few decades ago, and in the intervening time researchers have observed an important thing about these patients: living with two halves of a brain no longer communicating with each other, they seem to have two brains, not one. Not much is noticeable in terms of personality or behavior; interacting on the street or in stores, one cannot tell someone with a split brain, after corpus callectomy, apart from the rest of us. With neuropsychological tests, however, important abnormalities emerge.

  The right hemisphere of the brain controls the left visual field; the left hemisphere controls the right visual field. In all right-handed persons, language is fully controlled by the left hemisphere. (In left-handed persons, language is partly controlled by both hemispheres.) Thus in right-handed patients after split-brain surgery, the split between language and vision can be tested. If an image is shown to the right hemisphere (in the left visual field) of, say, a woman talking on a phone, the experimenter who asks the patient—What do you see?—will get an answer, a wrong answer, but an answer nonetheless. “I see a friend,” the subject might say. “What is the friend doing?” “Cooking dinner.” Then with a phone nearby, the experimenter can ask the subject, “Show me what you saw.” The subject will pick up the phone.

  The split-brain epilepsy patient “knows” what is seen by the right hemisphere, but she cannot speak it. What is most interesting is that she does not say, “I do not know,” or “I am unsure,” or some such. Even when prompted before the experiment by the researcher saying, “Now remember, you have had split-brain surgery for your seizures, keep that in mind when you answer my questions,” patients rarely say that they do not know what they saw, or why they feel as they do about what they saw. They never admit ignorance; they always make something up. That is the way our brains operate: our brains are rationalizing machines; we are designed, by God or evolution, to come up with plausible explanations for what we experience. We never say we do not know.

  269 Stephen Ambrose writes: Stephen Ambrose, “William T. Sherman: A Reappraisal,” American History Illustrated 1 (1967): 6–7.

  269 decades of excellent twin studies: Kenneth Kendler and Carol Prescott, Genes, Environment and Psychopathology (New York: Guilford, 2006).

  270 David Hume starkly laid out this “problem of causation”: David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

  271 The German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey: Rudolf Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). S. Nassir Ghaemi, The Rise and Fall of the Biopsychosocial Model (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

  272 “Whilst thus many men of genius themselves”: Ernst Kretschmer, The Psychology of Men of Genius (London: Kegan Paul; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.), 4.

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