ODD, CD, and MENTAL ILLNESS

There are three “scholarly articles” on ODD at the beginning of the Google list.  They are all worthless, circular, and unhelpful.  But knowing that is probably helpful.

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The Mayo clinic suggests:

More than 200,000 US cases per year

Can't be cured, but treatment may help

Chronic: can last for years or be lifelong

Requires a medical diagnosis

Lab tests or imaging not required

The cause of oppositional defiant disorder is unknown but likely involves a combination of genetic and environmental factors.

Symptoms generally begin before a child is eight years old. They include irritable mood, argumentative and defiant behavior, aggression, and vindictiveness that last more than six months and cause significant problems at home or school.

Treatment involves individual and family therapy.

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The idea is drugs and more-or-less forming a team to wrestle the kid to the ground.  No suggestion to investigate frustrations, unreal expectations, abuse, sexual invasion, and so on.  Note this medical clinic says ODD requires a medical diagnosis.  (How’s your insurance?)  but not lab tests or imaging that might reveal actual organic causes.  If you never look for any, you never find any.

I don’t know where all these people draw the line between ODD in children (it’s considered a childhood disorder mainly) and ODD in adults.  I expect it’s on the same boundary we draw between criminal behavior in children versus in adults.  We feel free to move the boundary if we are offended, so much depends on how charming the child may be.

When children get older, they are redefined from ODD to “Conduct Disorder”, which I guess is the same as the criminal category of “Disorderly Conduct.”  More helpfully, WebMD suggests some causes as follows:

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What Causes Conduct Disorder?

The exact cause of conduct disorder is not known, but it is believed that a combination of biological, genetic, environmental, psychological, and social factors play a role.

• Biological: Some studies suggest that defects or injuries to certain areas of the brain can lead to behavior disorders. Conduct disorder has been linked to particular brain regions involved in regulating behavior, impulse control, and emotion. Conduct disorder symptoms may occur if nerve cell circuits along these brain regions do not work properly. Further, many children and teens with conduct disorder also have other mental illnesses, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), learning disorders, depression, substance abuse, or an anxiety disorder, which may contribute to the symptoms of conduct disorder.

• Genetics: Many children and teens with conduct disorder have close family members with mental illnesses, including mood disorders, anxiety disorders, substance use disorders and personality disorders. This suggests that a vulnerability to conduct disorder may be at least partially inherited.

• Environmental: Factors such as a dysfunctional family life, childhood abuse, traumatic experiences, a family history of substance abuse, and inconsistent discipline by parents may contribute to the development of conduct disorder.

• Psychological: Some experts believe that conduct disorders can reflect problems with moral awareness (notably, lack of guilt and remorse) and deficits in cognitive processing.

• Social: Low socioeconomic status and not being accepted by their peers appear to be risk factors for the development of conduct disorder.

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These concepts are marginally helpful in considering Trump, though the real problem is that he has lost touch with reality.  Trump is mostly pretentious, inappropriate in tone, and belligerent.  There are stories of bad conduct in private, including striking his wives.  The cause might be poor socialization, but also frank mental illness.

So far, many people — a growing number including medical doctors and researchers — have frankly stated that our new president is suffering from Alzheimers.  He is not the first, since Ronald Reagan also had it by the time he left, though no one is sure of the time of onset.  At first the affliction is subtle.  It is age-related and also has a strong hereditary component.  Trump’s father had it before he died in 1999.  No one knows how crazy a president must be before he is impeached or the 25th amendment is used, because no one has been so crazy.  One wonders whether the voters were the crazy ones.  I think we should take that seriously.

We also need to think about whether grabbing pussies is technically disorderly.  Some call it simply assault.  It’s worth noting that people in Russia want to get rid of wife abuse laws, because abused wives die younger, which saves money and frees the husband, and also because abusing wives is normal Russian behavior.  This might be fake news, but it explains Melania’s tolerance of her boorish husband..  I was once on a panel of religious leaders about how one should handle death.  The Russian Orthodox priest said that men should be urged to repent beating their wives because in Heaven they will be considered sinful.  He seemed to think all men beat their wives anyway.  But then, he believed in Heaven.  Many Russians seem more inclined to believe in Hell.

PSYCHOTHERAPY IS NOT SACRED

Because “psychotherapy” comes from a medical frame based on the scientific method and values of objectivity, it is snarled in many ways.  A counter wave comes from the arts, particularly physical arts like dance, but also music, painting and sculpture, and clever ideas like arranging people in poses that echo their real-life dynamics.  In Western culture the two are gender-assigned and also status-assigned: that is, the women and indigenous are assumed to have access to the “spiritual” and therefore it is assumed to have less value and power than institutionally endorsed empire-builders.

Another distortion is what I call “honey-hunting,” which might more scientifically be called “hooked.”  That is, seeking what is sweet, easy, luxurious, and lights up the addiction-indicator in the brain.  Sex, drugs, and  “spirituality” will do the trick— for an interval, since variety is also needed, which links to seeking.  No sooner did I bring up the subject of what people call “spirituality” — which in my system is NOT the same as sacrality — the honey-hunters were finding me and my number of hits spiked.

To me, the great value of this stream of thought called embodiment is that it’s based on the human capacity to use their senses to access whatever the world “is” through an interpretive system called “metaphor.”  It is an “immanent” system, emerging from the senses, as opposed to the transcendence-based spiritualities that believe they are interacting with what is “above,” “powerful,” and probably explicated and claimed by an institution because it is always framed by the culture and therefore mimics their leaders.

In fact, the problem with honey-hunting is that they are soon evading all the scientific paraphernalia and that becomes the focus, either trying to catch honey in their scientific sieve or discrediting all filters as useless.  There are a number of paper “instruments” that attempt to define spirituality:  The Expressions of Spirituality Inventory, the Spiritual Transcendence Scale, the Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiousness/Spirituality, the Daily Spritual Experiences Scale, the Faith Maturity Scale, and the Religious Coping Questionnaire. 

Embodiment/sense-based sacrality is something felt when conditions are right.  What those conditions might be is what I’m trying to find out.  But language and even metaphor can never be the same as the original experience, which is far from universal and may, like a frog, be impossible to dissect without killing.  Neither does it have anything to do with virtue, which is bound to dismay some honey-hunters.

Always there is difficult opposition between society and the individual, maybe conflict among multiple social demands (family against profession, military against nonconformity).  The essential difference in this sea change from a surgery model (power, cutting, and transcendence) to a gardening model (nurturing organic unfolding) is that surgery is imposed, dependent on expertise, done by a professional (meaning cultural expert with status); but gardening is natural, and only dependent on nurturing, safety and opportunity.  Well — maybe risk is part of all therapy, simply by being alive and therefore dependent on survival.

For me the key to all “felt” experience goes back to Mircea Eliade’s little book called “The Sacred and the Profane,” which proposes that the sacred can be felt in the world at the extremes and the transitions.  Stand in a doorway or at the top of a staircase or on a mountain summit and you can feel it.  Neurologists today claim that specific cells in the brain are reacting to aspects of the world that have affected life from the beginning as eukaryotic one-celled animals.  Detecting edges, drop-offs, changes in what’s underfoot, altered light, and scores of other physical facts, are crucial to survival if traveling around, which is a definition of creatures.  

So I take an anchored, almost domestic and ordinary attitude towards the sacred — no caps, no status, nothing precious to hoard.  Just watching with awareness the sun come up in the morning.  Just openness to perception — no theory, no “healing”, no honey.

Before I leave today’s post, I want to point out the political dimension of spirituality which is considered — besides sweet to the point of addiction — a source and justification for power.  Before this wave of embodiment theory that seems to have a lot of connections to the U of Chicago, though (alas) not the Div School of my day, there was a set of disciplines developing around language: what it meant, how it was structured, how much it was culture-bound, and a lot of other hard-to-grasp things — though Hayakawa is far easier to understand than Ricoeur.  Some of the thought was coming from philosophy, but also a practical part of it was coming from anthropology which is more open to observation and animal elements of perception.  Barnlund’s class in “Language and Thought” prepared me then (1960) for Lakoff and Johnson in 1980, who were in part prepared by Noam Chomsky.

In the struggle to understand how people think by trying to understand the structure of their grammar, one is soon challenging the idea that language is a superiority, a separation, a rising above animals.  It seems clear that words come out of life in an environment.  Sitting with a chimp, communicating with body language, is a transforming experience.  It teaches us how much we lose if we deny the body to the point of thinking that a computer is human.  Sense-based thought depends upon the body to access the world.  Inability to grasp the world is psychosis.

“Therapy” in terms of human psychology was invented by Freud in the medical model as a way of bringing people in a highly restrictive culture into alignment with what was expected of them.  What he ran into was the limbic animal, which he called the subconscious, the 98% of neurological function that keeps bodies living even during sleep.  His instrument was talking, linguistics, sort of.  He was listening for metaphor, his genre was poetry, but his goal was still to make the client conform.

Bringing person and culture into alignment is a lot easier if the culture is tolerant of difference and resistant to stigma.  Spirituality, when it is co-opted by institutions and honey-hunters, can be as bullying as anything else.  Felt sacredness doesn’t respond to institutions and may not be sweet.  In fact, it might be full of terror or disgust because what counts is what keeps the creature alive.  That’s what pain is for.  Empathy, even with suffering, can keep us alive.

"JIMMY P: PSYCHOTHERAPY OF A PLAINS INDIAN": A Review

del Toro and Amalric

“Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian” is not a movie about Indians.  It is about human beings.  It is also a big lovable mutt of a welter of trauma, forces and questions that are always left by a war, at least the kind of war that WWII was.  This movie explores both the Indian and the psychoanalyst George Devereux, who is sort of inventing his work out of anthropology, philosophy, and ancient Greek assumptions, plus his own issues from a Hungarian Jewish family with a lawyer father and a mother at odds with him.  Edward Teller was his cousin.  His brother committed suicide.  He studied with VERY high level founders of sophisticated thought (Marie Curie!) and was never quite accepted by the Americans except Menninger, always a man with foresight and tolerance, perhaps a precursor to the Third Force psychology of the Sixties and Seventies.  

Devereux wrote 400 manuscripts, not all of them published.  “In "From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences" Devereux proposes to rethink the question of the relation between the observer and the observed. Devereux takes his guidance from psychoanalysis. According to him, the classical methodological principle which prescribes to the researcher to make his observations from a strictly objective point of view is not only impossible to put into practice but outrightly counterproductive. Instead the observer should place himself in the middle of the process and keep in mind that whatever he may observe is always influenced by his own activity of observing.”  This is a principle of particle physics, quantum mechanics.

Devereux wasn’t Procrustean (Freud’s dark side), but rather formed himself against the boundary of the person who presented and learned from that.  (Technically transference and countertransference.)  He was wrestling with the scientific requirement of being absolutely objective (impossible) versus the poet’s yearning to inhabit the revelation of another person’s life (dangerous).  But he was able to move successfully in and out of the other person’s experience, using empathy as much as analysis.  Writing everything down helped him to externalize it; long walking talks helped him share Jimmy P’s world, though he never came to the rez as did the film-makers.  He did previously have two years on the Mohave rez.

I agree with Roger Ebert , who said, "the movie offers the most psychologically complex screen portrait of a Native American character in at least twenty years, probably more" and "those who have undergone such treatment will appreciate how accurately the film portrays the process, never simplifying anything, never going for the easy dramatic epiphany, always respecting how analyst and patient circle around and around the edges of meaning". 

Desplechin was active in composing the script, with the help of Julie Peyr and Kent Jones.

Desplechin

Desplechin goes back and forth over his subjective/objective boundary by using an alter ego, Mathieu Amalric, who has been his representative often enough to move into it smoothly.  He also depicts the dreams as they are presented.  The result is a simple, clear, graceful portrayal of the relationship between two very different people. This film is already a classic because of this dimension: that it is accessible but not stupid.  

A few little flourishes from more recent scholarship than what was in the original book are helpful.  Clearly someone read the anthro scholarship about Blackfeet.  (“Manly-hearted women.”  And there’s Cyn Kipp!  Well, Mary Ground has gone on ahead, right?  And a lot of others.  But there are plenty left and they’re getting impatient!)

Hungarian Manly-Hearted Woman?

You should not go to see this movie because you dearly love and idealize Indians, not that they are put down, but because they are not treated as a separate species.  There are no feathers.  But to my heart’s joy, the land that made Siksika into a tribe is well-portrayed.  To my irritation and sometimes amusement, Benicio del Toro is about as Blackfeet as a Taiwanese playing a Korean.  The unfamiliar are not likely to notice much, but to those who know the difference, it will be a bug.  The compensation is that he’s an excellent actor and does a fine job with the dynamics of the character.

Another issue that needs to be acknowledged and then dismissed is del Toro’s attempt to speak in what some call the Indian drawl or brogue.  At your peril say “guttural” because to the unsophisticated it implies “the gutter,” though it really means words pronounced in the back of the throat.  Blackfeet language had a lot of consonants spoken against the soft palate and throat.  (Modern Blackfeet speakers tend to have accents because they can’t make those sounds anymore.) Their singing is falsetto, nasal, almost like throat-singing, but that is changing, too.  Del Toro ends up sort of halfway between Tonto and a Jamaican.

Upham and del Toro

The real Jimmy P. was from a family called “Everybody Talks About Him.”  Usually around here we leave off the “Him.”  Or even just say “Talks About.”  The name is not in the 1907 Blackfeet census but Devereaux is.   No relation.  Jason Devereaux was an art teacher here.  I didn’t know that George Devereux was actually György Dobó, but that clue begins to explain why the lives of Blackfeet would become relevant to him.  Both men had translated names because both had been culturally overrun.  Devereux was evading the Jewish danger (he converted to Christianity in 1933) and Talks About was living out an imposed culture.

Despite the fantasies of some, many tribes were very strict and closely prescribed behavior.  An unfaithful woman could have her nose cut off.  The last “Nosie” in Browning had died only a few years before I came in 1961.  Beatings were approved, a root of present violence.  The people who were friendly to Jesuit Catholicism were the same as those who had derived their sense of themselves from rule-following in the old way, just a matter of reframing the rules a bit.  To be thrown into a chaotic “anything-goes” situation like WWII meant a major change in the most basic assumptions.  

Almaric and McKee

For the Devereux character, it meant accepting a “Swedish” sort of tolerance in which loving someone unavailable (married to someone else) and losing them was simply necessary, a matter of rueful acceptance.  For the Jimmy P. character, faithlessness was intolerable and deserved punishment to the point of death.  He had been a warrior, he had been displaced, he had been robbed -- all of these things brought up unresolved issues from boyhood.  With a harsh mother and tough sister, a dead wife, a deserting wife, the only figure of female reconciliation in the movie that’s possible is the teenaged daughter, who is Catholic, raised by nuns.  Eventually, Jimmy could accept their ceremonies of confession and forgiveness and internalize them, which is what the psychotherapy was anyway.

There are a few loose ends, mostly the other Indians:  Gary Farmer, A. Martinez, Misty Upham, Michael Greyeyes and background extras.  None of their stories are pursued and only Misty is Blackfeet, but they give a sense of “group” which is very important when dealing with tribal people.

This film fits into the brain research issues I’ve been following.  If the level of challenge presented by things like war, esp. when the moral dimension is high enough, it becomes necessary to find a way to rebuild one’s world-view from the deepest, earliest levels.  One way is psychotherapy, but ceremonies can also work.  A previous icon of PTSD recovery has been Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel “Ceremony,” also about WWII.  In that book, the man goes back to his tribe and accepts the old ways.  If this kind of work is not done, either people will be assaulted and even killed, or gentle persons like Jimmy will turn the rage on themselves, blindly, painfully.