Study this, kids’ edition

It’s been a while since I’ve given you a “Study this” post, covering recently-released psychological research, so here are two research updates, both involving kids:

First, it’s been “discovered” that kids who listen to blaring music tend to do more drugs, drink more alcohol, and have more risky sex than other kids.  Wow!  Really?  Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll go together?  You’re kidding!  The researchers on this would probably say it indicates something about how a high sensory-stimulation threshold generalizes across stimuli.  Yeah, okay, let’s still hope that our tax dollars didn’t pay for this “aha!” moment.

Second, and more interestingly, research still in progress is attempting to generate a set of classification criteria to identify psychopaths in early childhood.  As an evaluator of adult psychopaths, I think it’d be great if we could intervene that early in the lives of psychopaths, but I don’t think it’s really feasible.  Little kids do things that certainly appear psychopathic sometimes, and those things certainly bear correction and watching, but some degree of narcissism and selfishness is developmentally typical in early childhood.  True psychopaths make conscious, calculated decisions to harm other people for their own gratification, knowing full well the extent and the permanence of the suffering that they cause, and a little kid’s mind generally isn’t fully-developed enough to make those kinds of calculated decisions.  I don’t think that a kid needs to have reached a certain chronological age in order to be labeled a psychopath, but I’m definitely skeptical of applying that label to kids in the single-digit years.

P.S.  There was also a lot of hype in the past month, much of it owing to a rather sickening Time Magazine cover, about “attachment parenting,” whose devotees do things like breast-feed and sleep in the same bed with their elementary-school-age (and beyond!) children.  It shouldn’t take a Ph.D. in clinical psychology to realize that that’s nutty, but in case anyone’s not sure, it’s nutty in my opinion.  More generally speaking, there seems to be an anti-establishment movement in America right now that’s questioning just about every American tradition (e.g. questioning whether capitalism is better than socialism, questioning whether an able-bodied/minded person should really have to get a job and provide for himself, questioning whether a kid — given the choice — would or should prefer to be raised by a married mom and dad rather than some other family structure, questioning whether there’s anything wrong with a five-year-old breast-feeding and sleeping with mommy and daddy, and on and on and on.).  There’s kind of a snarky, elitist attitude that I often encounter among some college students and faculty who arrogantly and/or naively presume that all of the previous generations of Americans, the ones who built the country into the freest, most prosperous nation on Earth, had it all wrong, and that those sipping lattes in the student union or occupying Wall St. (places that exist thanks largely to the fruits of those previous generations’ labor) today have it all figured out.  I generally encourage people to resist the sometimes-liberatingly-novel allure of such contrarian notions and keep in mind that, most of the time, our traditions became our traditions because they’ve worked.  That doesn’t mean that our traditions shouldn’t be analyzed and scrutinized — understanding why the successful ones work is key to preserving them — it just means people ought to double and triple think their logic before they conclude that a particular tradition isn’t worth preserving.  In their zeal to present themselves as geniuses who’ve figured out what generations upon generations of previous parents have missed, the “attachment parenting” folks focus so intently on the worthy goal of forming secure attachment bonds between parents and their children that they miss the larger point of parenting, which is to prepare children to ultimately detach from their parents and be fully-functional, independent, secure, productive adults.

Catching up on major cases in the news

Hey, been a while since I’ve posted anything here, been working hard on cases and on ’Til Death Do Us Part, premiering this fall on Investigation Discovery, so, here’s catching up on some major cases in the news:

William Balfour.  He’s the creep who murdered several members of the family of actress Jennifer Hudson.  He’s been found guilty on all counts and faces a mandatory life sentence.  Good riddance.

Dahrun Ravi.  He’s the jerk who video recorded and streamed his college roommate having a sexual encounter in their room at Rutgers University, which apparently played a role in precipitating the roommate’s suicide.  He was convicted weeks ago of invading the roommate’s privacy and doing so, in part, because the roommate was gay (i.e. a hate crime, which I don’t like, not because I care about Ravi, but because I generally don’t want crimes to be punished any less severely when the motive is something other than hate).  On Monday, Ravi was sentenced to one month in jail, a few years of probation, and some community service.  It’s not enough.  Even though he wasn’t legally found responsible for the roommate’s death, he should have done at least a year.  We don’t do enough in this country when people try to damage others’ reputations electronically.

Roger Clemens.  He’s the baseball player charged with lying to Congress about steroid use in Major League Baseball (which is federally regulated).  His trial is underway.  I’m convinced that he’s guilty, and if he is, I hope he gets convicted.  We don’t do enough to hold professional athletes and entertainers accountable for horrendous behavior in this country, and we need to do that, publicly, spectacularly, so America’s kids will see that many, if not most, of these people aren’t worth emulating anywhere but perhaps on an athletic field, in a recording studio, etc.  There are bad apples in every bunch, of course, but I think that generally, America’s kids would be a lot better off emulating doctors, teachers, soldiers, first responders, etc.  That’s why, if I were President, I’d use my photo ops to promote those unsung heroes who don’t get enough attention as it is rather than a bunch of athletes and entertainers who already get too much attention.

Anders Breivik.  He’s the Norwegian currently on trial in Norway for a bombing and shooting massacre that killed over 70 Norwegians, most of them teenagers, last year.  For a while, Breivik was supposedly “insane.”  Fortunately, a review of that determination by other psych experts found him to have been more than capable of knowing what he was doing and that it was wrong under Norwegian law.  Breivik even admitted that.  So, his trial has now been going on for three weeks.  Why?  Tough to know.  Nobody disputes that he committed mass murder, and he’s not legally “insane” (which of course doesn’t mean that he’s mentally healthy), so it seems like it ought to have been a one- or two-day open-and-shut guilty verdict with the maximum sentence.  That’s the scary part of this trial — even when he’s convicted, the maximum sentence in Norway will only guarantee that Breivik will be in a cage until he’s in his 50′s.  At that point, psych experts will have to find him to be an ongoing threat to public safety in order to keep him caged longer, and based on the divergence of opinion that we’ve seen among the Norwegian psych experts who’ve examined this guy, that’s by no means a slam dunk (unless of course they invite me to come over there and do an international psych consult!).

John Edwards.  He’s the former senator who had an affair while running for president back in 2008, and while his wife was dying of cancer, and allegedly used campaign donations to hide his pregnant mistress in style.  Testimony is over in his case, without any testimony from Edwards, and the jury is literally still out.  I was on the air the night this scandal broke, so I was one of the first national t.v. personalities to discuss it on the air.  Edwards is a sleaze bag for sure, but in order to find him guilty of a crime, the jury must conclude that he knew about the financing of the mistress with funds donated to support his campaign for the presidency.  It’s clear to me that this was the case — he knew where the mistress was; he was in contact with her the whole time; even if other staffers actually engineered the logistics of all that, how else could Edwards possibly have believed that an unemployed former campaign staffer was affording to live the high life?  The jury’s taking a while to reach a decision, however, suggesting that jurors are having a hard time reaching consensus.  They’ve asked to review some prosecution evidence, so that may be helpful, but I think that the longer this goes on, the more likely it is that Edwards walks.

George Zimmerman.  He’s the Florida neighborhood watchman who’s charged with second-degree murder in the shooting death of teenager Trayvon Martin.  The latest evidence released in the case shows that Zimmerman sustained multiple serious injuries in a physical altercation with Martin culminating in the shooting.  Despite that, prosecutors and others have argued that Zimmerman had the “opportunity to avoid” the altercation by not following Martin after a 911 dispatcher advised against it.  Here’s the thing, though:  It doesn’t matter.  Following someone may not be smart, but it generally isn’t illegal, even if a 911 dispatcher advises against it.  If you think about it, you could argue that practically anyone who’s been assaulted had the “opportunity to avoid” the assault had the person known that the assault was going to occur (and by the way, that goes for Martin as well — he had a cell phone; he could’ve called 911; he had the “opportunity to avoid” the altercation, too).  If you’re behaving lawfully in Florida (and in a number of other states), you’re not legally required to try to “avoid” an assailant before you can defend yourself against an unlawful assault — that’s what the widely-misreported “Stand Your Ground” law is all about, and it’s exactly what any potential assault victim, i.e. all of us, should want the law to be.  Then there’s the argument that Zimmerman may have initiated the physical altercation.  Doubt it.  Zimmerman knew he had a gun on him.  If he had thought that force was justified or necessary, it seems to me that he would have pulled the gun rather than initiating a fistfight.  The latest evidence indicates, however, that the gun didn’t come out until Zimmerman had had the tar kicked out of him by Martin, i.e. that Zimmerman tried to avoid killing Martin and pulled the gun as a last resort.  I’ve advised against rushing to judgment in this case, and I stand by that advice, but here’s the bottom line at this juncture:  If all Zimmerman did was follow Martin, and if, at some point, Martin turned around, rushed Zimmerman, and assaulted and battered Zimmerman, then Zimmerman’s the victim, and as sorry as I feel for Martin’s parents, Martin’s really just a tragic example of why it’s a bad idea to assault and batter someone, especially someone who might be armed (which, in a concealed-carry state like Florida, is just about any adult).

Joran van der Sloot.  He’s the creep who allegedly killed American teenager Natalee Holloway in Aruba several years ago and then murdered Peruvian Stephany Flores five years thereafter.  Serving 28 years in a Peruvian prison for the murder of Flores, he faces extradition to the U.S. now to stand trial for attempting to extort money from Holloway’s mother by offering to tell her what really happened to Natalee in exchange for cash.  I’ve been to Peru, and I would think that he’d have it worse in a Peruvian prison than he’d have it here in the U.S., but if this extradition allows the U.S. to tack on years to this creep’s total time in a cage, then I’m all for it.  I’ve said all along that I fully expect him to keep victimizing people as long as he has the opportunity to do so.

Paul Watson.  He’s the “captain” of the Sea Shepherds, an environmentalist group that uses violent tactics to try to prevent the killing of whales and other sea creatures around the world.  He’s been apprehended in transit in Germany and is being held there pending extradition to Costa Rica on an outstanding international warrant dating to 2002, when he allegedly captained a Sea Shepherds vessel in a collision with a Costa Rican shark-fishing vessel off the Central American coast, injuring some fishermen.  As I’ve said in the past, I don’t like seeing whales killed any more than you probably do (I just went whale-watching in Hawaii last winter, and they are truly magnificent creatures), but the civilized world cannot tolerate violence toward human beings in the name of saving whales.  If we do, then how can we tell Somali pirates that they can’t commit violence in the name of whatever “cause” that they may use to justify piracy, e.g. “international socioeconomic inequality.”  And how can we tell Al Qaeda that it can’t commit violence in the name of whatever “cause” it uses to justify terrorism, e.g. Islamic jihad?  If we’re going to condemn piracy and terrorism committed against Americans on the high seas (or anywhere in the world), then we need to also condemn the violence committed by Watson and his group, seize their vessels, and put them on trial for piracy.  I hope that the Costa Ricans finally lock Watson up for a good long time, but he seems to slip through the dragnets of justice time and time again, so I won’t be holding my breath.

The only safe place…

…for guys like Anders Breivik and Charles Manson is a cage — or a box.  Breivik is the Norwegian man who killed 77 people in a bombing, followed by a mass shooting, in Norway last July.  Manson of course is the “mastermind” of a series of murders in California in the 1960′s.

An initial psychological examination of Breivik concluded that he was schizophrenic and essentially not guilty by reason of insanity, but a subsequent examination has since found him to be sane.  It’ll be up to a panel of judges now to decide which expert’s opinion to believe, but Breivik reportedly agrees with the second opinion — he reportedly maintains that he knew precisely what he was doing.  The scary thing is that even if Breivik is found guilty of 77 murders, the maximum sentence under Norwegian law is…get this…21 years in prison…and he’s only 33 years old.  Apparently, there is a possibility that he could be kept incarcerated — either a correctional or a mental-health facility of some kind — beyond his fixed sentence, if he’s adjudged to be a continuing threat to Norwegian public safety, but it’s not guaranteed.

Now, I’d like to report that we’re a lot better at guaranteeing public safety here in the U.S., but guess what…Manson’s up for parole.  He’s not likely to get it, but technically, California’s thinking about it.  What?  Initially, Manson received a death sentence, but when California got rid of its death penalty for a period of time in the 1970′s, death sentences were commuted to life in prison with the possibility of parole.  So let’s get this straight:  First, we were going to execute somebody; then, we decided not to do that; so instead, we decided to hold the guy for a while and then think about letting him out.  Now that’s crazy.  As I said, you really probably don’t have to worry about Manson ever being back out on the streets with you, at least not anytime soon, but we shouldn’t be putting victims’ families through this angst every so many years.  There simply shouldn’t be any question.

[While I'm here, remember what I told you about Autism a few posts ago -- about how I think it's being grossly over-diagnosed, and as the authors of the DSM attempt to constrain this somewhat, that there'd be push-back from the "Autism industry"?  Well, since then, you may have noticed an almost-daily series of headlines, generated by a steady stream of press releases emanating from within the "Autism industry," touting "groundbreaking" findings like the following:  Autism is supposedly associated with maternal obesity, paternal age, parental socioeconomic status....and the list goes on.  Pretty soon, your child will supposedly be "more likely to have an Autism-spectrum disorder" if you've ever consumed a beer, had the flu, or seen any violence on television.  In my opinion, this is becoming an almost-comical attempt to take a serious disorder which actually affects a relatively small number of children and "mainstream" it to the point where all parents think they see Autism symptoms in their kids, and just about any kid can be classified somewhere along the spectrum.  Once again, I think this kind of "junk science" just fuels "junk diagnoses" and ultimately does a huge disservice to America's kids -- the relative few whose symptoms actually fall within the Autism spectrum and deserve clinical attention, and the vast majority, who fall squarely within normal limits and don't need to be labeled otherwise.]

‘Til Death Do Us Part

  ‘Til Death Do Us Part  Scroll down to #2 under “New Original Series”!

Lessons — some learned, some not

Hey everybody, belated happy Easter and Passover!  This brief post is about lessons — some learned, some not.  Where do you think people seem to be getting wiser lately — here in the Midwest, or in Washington, D.C.?  Consider these illustrations…

First, lessons learned:

Over Easter/Passover weekend, police in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in cooperation with state and federal law enforcement agencies/officers appear to have solved a terrifying shooting spree almost as quickly as it broke out.  Within hours, maybe minutes, of one another, three victims were killed and two more were wounded in a predominantly-black area of Tulsa.  The shootings appeared random, except for the race of the victims, all black.  A witness initially described one shooter, a white male in a white truck, who approached a victim requesting driving directions before opening fire in a cowardly ambush.  Within hours, authorities had not one but two men in custody, both white males, at least one of whom appears to have been motivated by racism (his father apparently was killed by a black man years ago).  A tip phoned in by a concerned citizen led officers to the suspects, but I think that the rapid law-enforcement response (which included soliciting the public’s assistance) and the coordination between law-enforcement agencies helped to both generate and capitalize on the tip.  Assuming that the two suspects in custody are in fact the shooters, I think that lessons learned from both 9/11 and the “Beltway Snipers” case led to the rapid closure of a case that otherwise could’ve terrorized the Tulsa area for weeks or months (as happened in the “Beltway Snipers” case).  Props to all of the law enforcement agencies and professionals involved!

Now, lessons not learned:

It’s been reported that the Obama Administration has told Iran behind the scenes that the U.S. is open to Iran continuing to develop nuclear technology so long as it’s used only for peaceful purposes (i.e. energy).  To this forensic psychologist, that sounds at best, naive, and at worst, like a resignation to further nuclear development by the rogue state.  It’s kind of like a parole officer telling a paroled shooting-spree killer that the state is open to him possessing assault weapons so long as they’re only used for hunting.  The Clinton Administration took the “We’ll-condone-it-as-long-as-you-don’t-build-a-bomb” route with North Korea, and guess what — the North Koreans built a bomb (multiple bombs in fact).  Looks like a lesson not learned.  Also, countries that deny having nuclear weapons programs scare me more than countries that are open about it.  Why?  Because I believe that surreptitious possessors of such weapons are generally more interested in actually launching attacks, while open possessors are generally more interested in deterring attacks (and I’m neither the first nor the most historically-astute commentator to make this observation).

And, as the Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments on the constitutionality of the pending Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. “Obama Care”), Justice Sonia Sotomayor questioned the lawyers about what would happen to uninsured Americans if the Court were to invalidate the legislation.  You may recall that back when Justice Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings were underway, I said that she was a poor choice for the Court in my opinion because she didn’t seem to understand the job.  Well, she got confirmed, yet she still doesn’t seem, to this lawyer anyway, to understand the job.  Back during her confirmation hearings, she said that “empathy” should play a role in Supreme Court decisions.  No, it shouldn’t, and the arguments over the Affordable Care Act are a perfect case in point.  The legislation is either constitutional, or it’s not.  That determination is supposed to be made by reading the Constitution, reading the legislation, and discerning whether the former permits the latter.  If the legislation is unconstitutional, then it’s Justice Sotomayor’s job to say so, regardless of how she thinks it could’ve helped anyone.  We don’t keep unconstitutional laws on the books in this country, even if they’re supposedly helping some people.  Looks like another lesson not learned (although I still predict that a majority of the Supreme Court’s justices will find the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional, at least with respect to the provision that requires everyone in America to either secure health insurance coverage or pay a fine — stay tuned, we should find out sometime in June).

Thoughts on the Oakland college shooter

As the KU (where I teach a course) men’s basketball team was preparing to fight for the NCAA championship in New Orleans, Louisiana yesterday, students at a small technical college in Oakland, California were fighting, too…for their lives.  In a scene eerily reminiscent of Cho Seung-Hui’s 2007 rampage at Virginia Tech, a 40-something male former student returned to the campus armed with at least one handgun, reportedly ordered students to line up against a wall, and opened fire, shooting randomly as the students fled for their lives.  He then reportedly went door-to-door inside the school in search of more victims before fleeing the scene (note that he tried to get away alive rather than committing suicide, as has been the more common pattern in recent memory including the Virginia Tech case — I’ll come back to that in a moment), only to be apprehended while apparently trying to blend into the crowd of shoppers at a nearby grocery store a short time later.  At last count, seven victims are dead, and several more are wounded.

Also reminiscent of Seung-Hui at Virginia Tech, the Oakland gunman reportedly has expressed “no remorse” in confessing to police that he committed mass murder because people at the school “were not treating him respectfully” back when he was a student there.  If that report is accurate, it’s illustrative of the malignant narcissism at the core of a psychopath’s personality.  Think about this for a moment — he supposedly felt mistreated, verbally, by people at the school, which in his mind apparently entitled him to go back and murder people there.  In other words, he apparently thinks he’s so incredibly special that anyone who insults him (if anyone even did) deserves to die.  This kind of narcissism is extremely dangerous because those who harbor it tend to rationalize and justify pretty much anything they want to do in life, regardless of the law, regardless of who gets hurt.

Now before anyone goes dismissing this guy as “insane,” please allow me to dispel that probability.  If the Oakland rampage went down as reported, then he clearly thought it through and planned it out in advance.  Then afterward, he clearly tried to escape the consequences of his actions, abandoning the murder weapon(s) as he fled and attempting to evade pursuit by blending into a crowd of grocery shoppers.  Premeditation (my “3 P’s”:  planning, preparation & practice) and consciousness of guilt cut strongly against any defense predicated upon a contention that the accused didn’t know what he was doing or that it was wrong (and I mean “wrong” by society’s standards, i.e. illegal, not “wrong” by some narcissist’s standards — he may think that he should be entitled to kill people whom he perceives to have slighted him, but that’s not enough to make him legally “insane”).  Is he a mentally-healthy guy?  Obviously not, but that’s not the question.  The questions are, was he able to know what he was doing (based on what’s been reported in the media, apparently yes), and if so, was he able to know that it was wrong (based on what’s been reported in the media, apparently also yes).  Many people have mental problems, but very, very few of those people are so dysfunctional as to be legally insane (i.e. not responsible for crimes that they commit).

Lastly, in terms of prevention of future similar incidents, I must repeat, once again, my mantra in these cases:  nobody commits mass murder as his/her first malignantly-narcissistic, sociopathically or psychopathically dangerous, destructive act.  I can virtually guarantee you right now that this guy has a history of deeply-concerning behavior (I’ll bet it even played some role in his expulsion from the school in the first place).  Over and over again in these cases, I make the point that, all too often, we don’t do enough to protect innocent people from individuals who’ve shown clear indications of propensities toward violence.  We’ll have to stay tuned to find out the extent to which this tragic Oakland rampage could’ve and should’ve been prevented, but the larger point going forward is this:  When someone effectively screams out that he or she is dangerous, we need to take that individual at his/her word, and in deciding how then to respond, we need to err more on the side of concern for potential victims’ safety and less on the side of concern for that individual’s liberty.

Was I wrong about Autism?

Recent data published by the Centers for Disease Control indicate that one in every 88 American kids has Autism.  So, does this mean I’ve been wrong about the so-called Autism “epidemic” in this country?  No, I don’t think so.  Keep in mind, these new data indicate how many kids have an Autism-spectrum diagnosis.  They don’t indicate how many kids actually have the condition.  In other words, they don’t do anything to separate the invalid diagnoses from the valid ones.  If you’ve been a regular reader or viewer for a while, a lot of this will be familiar to you, but here’s the real story on Autism as I see it:

First of all, Autism is a real and serious condition, and I have sympathy for sufferers and their parents.  At the same time, I think that the prevalence of Autism among America’s kids is being greatly overstated by a rapidly-growing “Autism industry” — similar to the “ADHD industry” that’s been foisting unnecessary psych meds upon millions of kids for decades now.  As both a lawyer and a psychologist, I want to take on these “industries” because I think they hurt kids.  In my professional judgment, there’s simply no way that five or six million American kids have diseased brains that can’t focus attention (ADHD), and there’s no way that one out of every 88 American kids has a pervasive developmental disease (Autism).

It’s not that there’s been an Autism explosion in America, and it’s not that we clinicians have just gotten exponentially better at detecting Autism cases that went undetected in previous generations.  It’s that medical and mental-health professionals have been steadily expanding and loosening the definition of Autism to encompass kids who really just have minor (if any) developmental delays that they’ll typically grow out of within a few years.  Take diabetes for example:  As it is now, if your fasting plasma glucose level is consistently above 125 mg/dl, you may be considered diabetic, but if we steadily dropped that cutoff down to say 100 mg/dl, we’d steadily have a lot more diabetics.

Here are three reasons why I think this has happened:

1) Parents of mildly-delayed kids who don’t want to admit that their kids are just average kids, or who want a chemical shortcut around the hard parenting work that’s needed to help a mildly-delayed kid catch up, or who want to secure benefits and services for their kids, sometimes actually seek out a diagnosis,

2) As pharmaceutical companies have developed (or, more often, re-purposed) drugs to try to “treat” Autism, they’ve pushed the diagnosis, just as they’ve pushed the ADHD diagnosis, and

3) There’s been a lot of agenda-driven, activist-driven research promoting the idea that Autism’s a lot more common than I think it really is, and this research has been disseminated by individuals and organizations who have vested interests in getting more research dollars thrown at the problem (i.e. if you’re a researcher whose job is funded by tax and/or pharmaceutical dollars, and you’re studying 100 kids, and you’re motivated to “stretch” the Autism diagnostic criteria to fit as many of them as possible, then it’s really no big surprise that you might succeed once by the time you get to kid #88, even though I could probably examine that same kid the next day and disagree with you completely).

Even the American Psychiatric Association is onto this:  As it prepares the upcoming 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the Association has announced that it’s narrowing the diagnostic criteria for Autism so that it’ll be harder to (ethically) diagnose the disorder (you know it’s bad if the Association’s actually trying to shrink the number of Americans who qualify for a psychiatric diagnosis – it usually seems to want to do the opposite, progressively expanding the diagnostic manual to Biblical proportions with each successive edition!).

If/when a narrower set of diagnostic criteria actually sees the light of day, you’ll hear sob stories in the media from the “Autism industry” and its beneficiaries (including some celebrities) about kids and parents who may no longer qualify for insurance and government benefits.  When you hear such stories, keep in mind that billions of insurance and tax dollars are being spent on services for kids who really don’t have any serious problems – that’s a powerful incentive for some parents, pharmaceutical companies, and clinicians to want the diagnosis to be liberally applied, valid or not.

In the meantime, here’s my bottom line on what I continue to believe to be the over-diagnosis of Autism:  It’s insidious, because when you have a bunch of basically-normal kids being raised as if they have a mental disorder — whether it’s ADHD or Autism — it’s not good for those kids (because it lowers people’s expectations of them, as well as their expectations of themselves, which can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy), and it’s not good for the kids who really do have the disorder either, because it dilutes the pool of resources available to them.

What happened to the pilot?

Just a couple of weeks after a self-reportedly “bipolar” airline flight attendant disrupted a flight by rambling incoherently about safety problems and warning of an imminent crash, people are asking me what might explain the similarly-erratic behavior of a Jet Blue airliner captain whose erratic behavior necessitated his restraint by passengers and an emergency landing on Tuesday.  His erratic behavior reportedly began in the cockpit, with the captain suddenly pressing buttons and flipping switches haphazardly, whereupon a quick-thinking co-pilot asked him to check something in the passenger compartment then locked the cockpit door behind him.  The captain then reportedly tried to enter an occupied lavatory, tried to re-enter the cockpit, and ran down the aisle rambling loudly and incoherently about Al Qaeda, an imminent crash, and the need for passengers to pray.  Ultimately, passengers reportedly restrained the captain while an off-duty pilot who happened to be among the passengers went to the cockpit and assisted the co-pilot in the emergency landing of the aircraft.  Upon landing, the captain was evacuated from the plane to a waiting ambulance, but no details of his condition have been released at this hour.  So, was Tuesday’s incident another manifestation of a “bipolar” disorder, or was it something else?  It’s tough to say with so few details available, but here are some possibilities:

The behavior described above generally sounds psychotic — specifically, disorganized and delusional.  Statistically, it’s a little unusual for a person to experience his/her first psychotic episode in his 40′s or 50′s, the estimated age of this pilot.  If, for example, he were bipolar and experienced a manic episode with psychotic features on Tuesday, that typically wouldn’t have been the first time, and he probably wouldn’t have been able to maintain a pilot’s license.  I’ve done the kind of assessment that the FAA requires of pilots when there are concerns about mental fitness to fly, and I can tell you: 1) that bipolar disorders typically manifest earlier in life than the 40′s and 50′s, 2) bipolar disorders, once diagnosed, are almost always medicated, and 3) the FAA typically does not license people who take the mood stabilizers and anti-psychotics commonly prescribed to people with bipolar disorders.  In addition, the pilot’s wife stated in an interview that she had no idea what could’ve happened to her husband, and assuming that’s true, it supports my speculation that whatever happened on Tuesday was a new phenomenon for this guy.

So, what else could cause somebody to become psychotic suddenly for the first time in his 40′s or 50′s with no evident trauma to the brain?  Maybe he had some kind of cerebrovascular event — people sometimes behave in ways that look psychotic after strokes.  It’s also possible that he had some kind of chemically-induced psychosis, perhaps as a result of prescription or recreational drug use that started recently (I’d generally expect any established pattern of problematic drug use to have been identified by the FAA and to have already resulted in the loss of his license) or as a result of an interaction between two or more drugs not regularly taken together.  It’s also possible that he had a complex partial seizure, which can produce temporary psychosis, but again, it would almost have to have been his first one ever — which is possible — because the FAA typically doesn’t license people with seizure disorders.  Finally, it’s possible that an overwhelming amount of stress sent this guy into a panicked, psychotic state, but if that was the case, I’d generally expect the wife to have some idea what was going on and/or the co-pilot to have noticed something unusual about the pilot’s demeanor prior to takeoff.

Those are my initial, admittedly totally speculative, thoughts.  Stay tuned for more details about Tuesday’s incident, but if you’re flying in the meantime, I wouldn’t be too worried.  Incidents in which airline pilots have become mentally incapacitated in the cockpit are extremely rare, like maybe one per decade on average.

Don’t rush to judgment in FL case

You’ve probably heard about the Florida case in which an Hispanic volunteer neighborhood watchman shot and killed an unarmed black teenager.  Virtually everyone in the mainstream media, up to and including the President, seems to be rushing to the judgment that the watchman is a racist who shot the deceased, Trayvon Martin, just because he was black.  But since the moment this story broke, I’ve been cautioning people against that.

The watchman, George Zimmerman, apparently had a legal permit to carry a gun, and as facts dribble out, we’re also learning that Zimmerman may have sustained a broken nose and deep lacerations to his head before pulling the gun.  Police responding to the scene also did not arrest Zimmerman.  Now maybe that’s because they’re all racists, too, or maybe it’s because there’s ample, as-yet-undisclosed evidence that the shooting was in self-defense.

Some in the media are saying that this proves there’s something wrong with “stand your ground” laws like the one they have in Florida.  No, it doesn’t prove that.  Basically, “stand your ground” laws simply say that you don’t have to try to run away from an assailant before using deadly force to defend yourself — i.e., you can “stand your ground.”  That’s as it should be.  If someone comes running at you with a baseball bat, for example, you shouldn’t have to turn your back on the assailant and try to run away before you defend yourself, and you certainly shouldn’t have to let the assailant actually hit you with the bat before you can defend yourself (if you’re still conscious of course).  If you have a gun on you (legally of course), then you should be able to pull that gun before the assailant makes contact with you, and if the assailant keeps coming at you, and if you’re in legitimate fear of being killed or seriously physically harmed, then you should be able to pull the trigger.

Now obviously, if you’re the assailant, then none of the above applies.  In this case, Zimmerman apparently was advised by a 911 dispatcher not to follow Martin through the neighborhood but did so anyway.  That might’ve been dumb, but it probably wasn’t illegal.  Now, maybe Zimmerman also then initiated physical contact with Martin, and if so, Zimmerman may essentially have become an assailant and thereby forfeited the right to “stand his ground” and defend himself with deadly force.

Similarly obviously, if the assailant coming at you with a baseball bat is five years old, you wouldn’t be in legitimate fear of death or serious physical harm.  When you look at the dated, smiling photos of Martin that are all over the mainstream media, sure, it’s tough to imagine him putting you in fear of death or serious physical harm, but in the dark of night, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, it’s possible that Martin, who was reportedly over six feet tall at age 17, legitimately looked more capable of inflicting life-threatening damage in hand-to-hand combat, even before any blows were thrown.  Now fear of death or serious physical harm exists in the mind of the beholder, so the law generally requires that it be “reasonable,” i.e. that a reasonable person in the same position would’ve felt similarly (even if, in the light of day, it turns out that the fear was relatively unfounded — e.g. that the assailant’s bat was an inflatable toy instead of an actual metal or wood bat).

I could be wrong, but at this point, it’s not really sounding to me like Zimmerman simply saw a black man and opened fire — as I said from minute one of this story, it’s sounding more complicated than that.  If the gun didn’t come out until after Zimmerman had sustained some physical injuries, then he may have waited even longer than he legally was required to wait (i.e. until he had actually been physically injured) before pulling his gun.  Initially, we were getting reports that eyewitnesses had heard Martin screaming for help.  Now, we’re hearing that it may actually have been Zimmerman screaming for help.

All we really know at this point is that a teenager is dead, and that’s tragic.  We simply don’t yet have all of the necessary facts to determine what should happen next — I don’t, you don’t, the President doesn’t, and the rest of the media doesn’t.  Maybe Zimmerman’s a guilty, cold-blooded, racist murderer, or, maybe he’s an innocent idiot, or maybe, the truth lies elsewhere, perhaps somewhere in between.   That’s why we have grand juries like the one in Florida that’s going to consider all of the evidence in this case and determine whether there’s probable cause to charge Zimmerman with a crime and put him on trial.

So, as I’ve said all along, let’s nobody rush to judgment here because that’s not good for anyone, including the deceased — it’s obviously not good for the deceased if we rush to the judgment that no crime was committed, but it’s also not good for the deceased if we rush to the judgment that murder was committed just because there’s a lot of public outcry.  The former would add credence to allegations of racism in the justice system for years to come, and the latter would call the legitimacy of any subsequent conviction into question for years to come.  In other words, either error would raise serious and valid questions as to whether justice was done, and I personally prefer to feel certain of that, whatever the ultimate outcome, even if it takes us longer to get there than any of us would like.

A different kind of madness

If you’re a regular reader or viewer, you know that I write and talk about “madness” a lot.  Usually, it’s “madness” of the type often alleged to exist in someone like the serial murderer and avowed Al Qaeda affiliate who was shot to pieces yesterday (good riddance!) as he tried to escape from French authorities after going on an anti-Semitic, anti-Western shooting spree that spanned several days.  Or, it’s “madness” of the type alleged to exist in someone like the late singer Whitney Houston, who seemed to have had everything to live for, yet wasted a life away on drugs (we’re now hearing that she had plenty of cocaine in her system in addition to prescription anxiety medication and apparently also marijuana when she died last month — no surprise, but sad nonetheless).

Today, however, I’m writing about a different kind of “madness” — one that I actually know less about — “March” madness.  That’s right, I’m talking about people’s fanaticism surrounding the college basketball tournament held at this time each year.  I have to preface this by acknowledging that I’m not much of a sports fan.  Even though I teach a course at a major basketball school, I couldn’t tell you who’s on the team or much of anything about the program.  I’d virtually always rather be out running or kayaking or participating in a game myself than sitting indoors watching other people play a game (and in either case, I wouldn’t care much who won or lost, just that I had a fun social experience).  And if I were the President, I don’t think I’d be scheduling White House photo ops with championship sports teams — I’d figure they get enough attention as it is, so instead, I’d spend that time spotlighting unsung heroes like cops, firefighters, soldiers, teachers, trauma surgeons, etc.

So, if I can’t write about “March Madness” as a fan, then how can I write about it, you ask?  As a psychologist — specifically, in this instance, as a behaviorist.  Because I have friends who get caught up in “March Madness” at this time of year, I always end up watching a few games, and because I don’t care who wins or loses, my mind inevitably wanders to the psychology of it all — especially when a supposed “40 minutes” of play time can end up taking more like three hours, with the final “two minutes” of play time dragging out into a substantial portion of that third hour, as a succession of intentional “fouls” committed by the trailing team repeatedly stops the clock (allowing the leading team to shoot two “free throws,” worth one point each, for a maximum of two points, if both shots are good, after which possession of the ball reverts to the trailing team, giving that team a chance to shoot a two- or three-point shot and hopefully close the gap in the score).

I understand the intentional-foul strategy, but it irks me every time I sit through it, and I don’t think it’s just because I’m bored.  Admittedly, I generally want the games to hurry up and be over, but I think I’m also irked because I believe in the “rule of law” — that’s probably part of why I became a lawyer and a forensic psychologist.  I believe that people’s incentives should be to follow the law, but in basketball, there’s something that behaviorists sometimes call a “perverse incentive,” whereby there’s actually more of an incentive to break the law (i.e. the rules of the game), at least for a trailing team in the waning minutes of a close game.  If a particular act on the basketball court is really considered “foul” — i.e. undesirable, unacceptable, illegal, etc. — then every player’s incentive, at all times, should be to avoid committing that act.

Now, as you may know, I don’t usually present a problem without also proposing a solution, so even though basketball generally isn’t within the scope of my expertise, I still won’t let you down!  When I’m in charge, we’re going to change the rules of basketball to make “free throws” in the final two minutes of play worth three points each.  That way, if even one of the two is good, the leading team will get as many points as the trailing team could possibly get on its next possession, and if both “free throws” are good, the leading team will pull significantly farther ahead.  In other words, the leading team would have to miss both “free throws” in order for an intentional-foul strategy to pay off for the trailing team (which, as I understand it, is generally not a safe bet).  In that case, the incentive to intentionally foul would be effectively removed from the game, the game would embody respect for the rule of law, and “40 minutes” would take closer to two hours instead of three, which, I think, would be an improvement on multiple levels!

Have a great weekend, and enjoy the “madness” if you’re so inclined!