by Julian Lieb
Mental illness: Society should understand the role of
manic-depressive disorder and paranoia in crimes of
genocide
WHILE MENTAL HEALTH PROFESSIONALS and patients yearn to see mental illness
destigmatized, it is contrary to society's interests to ignore or minimize
the role of emotional disorders in bigotry, hate crimes, and genocide.
Consider the perpetrators of the most terrible hate crimes in history.
Those who knew or studied Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin offer vivid
descriptions of the paranoid, delusional form of manic depressive order
both men experienced.
One side of Hitler was despairing, indecisive, isolated, unable to
care for himself and had impaired concentration and memory. His speech
was hesitant, he was confused, despondent and apathetic and suffered
paranoid delusions, especially about Jews. This Hitler was afraid of
water, horses and the moon. He washed his hands constantly because of
his phobic dread of infection. He survived six suicide attempts before
succeeding with the seventh.
The other side of Hitler was egotistical, arrogant, grandiose, loquacious,
aggressive and irritable. He had delusions of omnipotence, invincibility
and infallibility, violent mood swings, rages, racing thoughts and pressured
speech.
At 17, Hitler was twice rejected by the Vienna Academy of Arts. It
caused him to fall into a deep, paranoid, delusional depression in which
he spewed anti-Semitic hatred. His bigotry became a raging obsession.
Unable to admit to himself that his talent or training might be insufficient,
he blamed the Jewish members of the academy faculty for keeping him
out of the art school. "For this, the Jews will pay," he wrote to the
academy's director.
During World War II, Theodor Morell, Hitler's personal physician, had
daily contact with him and supplied him with amphetamines and cocaine
for his depression. In 1943, the doctor was emboldened to state publicly
that the Fuhrer was a manic depressive.
Anti-Semitism is a pathologic state of mind. Why else would it continue
to thrive in a country like Poland, with a Jewish population of less
than 4,000?
In depression, Stalin was indecisive, anxious, pessimistic, indifferent,
gloomy, lonely, paranoid and had low self-esteem. In mania, he had grandiose
delusions, rages, paranoia and hypersexuality. He abused alcohol in
both phases.
As early as 1919, when Stalin was commander of Tsaritsyn, later called
Stalingrad, now Volgograd, Leon Trotsky observed how "a military setback
.... became in his [Stalin's] mind a product not of error or accident,
but of treason."
Stalin targeted his paranoid, murderous hatred at those who he feared
knew more than he did on any subject and people who he suspected of
knowing his personal affairs. His paranoid delusions led him to accuse
of treason and execute millions for failures of his own making. Any
person or group might become a target. No one was safe, not even his
own family or his inner circle.
The paranoid delusions of manic-depressives are as infectious and
as virulent as a deadly microbe and can easily infect those in thrall
to the host figure. It is a phenomenon known as "induced psychosis,"
and we have seen it operating in Guyana, Waco and Tokyo.
Despite the catastrophic consequences of the paranoid delusions of
such manic depressive demagogues as Jim Jones and David Koresh, our
modern institutions have made no effort to educate society that the
hatred of bigots and demagogues, whether expressed in incendiary language
or in deed, is often a symptom of manic depressive disorder.
The classification of manic depressive disorder as a single psychiatric
disease was published by the German doctor Emil Kraepelin in 1921. One
of the paradoxes of this disease is that while its benign form has given
us many of our creative geniuses, its paranoid sister has unleased bigots
and mass murderers.
With the war defeat closing in on him, Hitler committed suicide in
1945. Four years later, Australian psychiatrist John Cade established
the therapeutic value of lithium in treating manic depressive disorder.
Had lithium been available in Hitler's time, humanity might have
been spared World War II and the Jewish genocide. It is a quirk of fate
that should not be lost on anyone interested in preventing hate crimes.
Julian Lieb is a psychiatrist in Woodbridge, Conn. He is coauthor
with D. Jablow Hershman of "The Key to Genius" (Prometheus Books, 1988)
and "A Brotherhood of Tyrants" (Prometheus Books, 1994).
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Commentary
The piece above was published on the Op-Ed pages of the L.A.Times on
February 16, 1996. I am pleased to say that a couple of days later it
got the scathing denunciation in a letter to the editor that it so richly
deserved.
This particularly offensive bit of writing is offered to illustrate
the lengths to which some influential members of society are willing
to go to cement their brand of correct-think into the minds of the masses.
Think like I do or you must be crazy.
The good doctor discovers an elemental fact known to wise men millenia
before psychiatry rose up to cloak insight in pretension - namely that
powerful and creative people tend to have mercurial personalities, and
are given to wide mood swings. In listing the manic-depressive monsters,
he forgot to include people like Winston Churchill, Franz Kafka, and
the entire host of those afflicted with a "disorder" that affects more
than 10% of the population in general, and perhaps 90% of its movers
and shakers.
It is horribly ironic that the first sentence of this poisonous missive
mentions how much those afflicted with mental illnesses want to see
their conditions destigmatized. Just so. And equating manic-depression
with evil incarnate certainly accomplishes that goal doesn't it? Telling
people that the seeds of evil are to be found in manic-depression, and
that it is as infectious and virulent as a deadly microbe seems to this
reader to be a good example of what the writer purports to deplore -
acts of hate. He hates antisemitism so much that he's willing to brand
a huge group of innocent people with the mark of the beast to make his
point that people who dislike members of other ethnic groups or wish
them harm are mentally ill. If he were to make public comments in a
similar vein about AIDS victims, the Times wouldn't publish it to begin
with, and he'd be hounded into silence if it did find a public forum.
Where do opinions like this lead? See An
Alternative: Criminalize Bigotry for a preview.
The bold sections in the main text of the article were added for emphasis.
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