Indian Madness - The Dark Side of Spirituality.

India was always a land for the spiritually and superstitiously inclined. That is all fine and well when we think about Buddha and Gandhi. But like everywhere else, such thinking can have dangerous consequences. Recently, a witch in India was filmed being beaten while she was tied to a tree.

The story: A man hires a woman with spiritual powers to magically cure his ailing wife. When his wife conditions turns worse, he blames the woman for putting a curse on his wife. In a fit of rage, he chains the woman to a tree, gathers a mob, and proceeds to beat and abuse the woman. Here is a vid of the incident - Warning, this video is graphic and disturbing.

Disturbing as this video is, such behavior is text book example of what psychologist and sociologist call displacement and scape-goating. The man could not fight the invincible power of his wife’s sickness, so he displaces his frustration on the poor woman who tried to help. He blamed her for something that was clearly out of her (or his) control. By attacking her he was able to feel less powerless (and perhaps less guilty). Likewise, the group took up the opportunity to take out their trouble and frustration on a stranger who became the symbol of their lowly condition. By doing so, the sociologist tell us, the group managed to redirect and allay their collective fears and anxieties onto an “other”, a scapegoat.

Such events are sadly not all together uncommon in certain parts of the world. But the winds of change are blowing, even in India. A friend of mine recently sent me an article about a TV show in India which featured a live confrontation between a famous tantrik “holy man” and self-proclaimed rationalist Anal Edamaruku. They came together to discuss “Tantrik power versus Science”, and to opine on wither or not people can have magical powers. When the tantrik man claimed that he had the power to kill and harm others with magic spells, Anal challenged him to prove it by trying to kill him. The tantrik man agreed, and for the next few hours he tried to kill Anal with his spells. While the events garnered large ratings, at the end no one died, and Anal was pronounced the winner of the encounter.

The rationalist’s victory may seem to us amusing and silly, but in a society that still experiences pockets of witch-persecution it is nothing to wiggle your nose at. It is a small but important triumph of rationality over superstition. The irony, of course, is that if the millions of people who watched the show were to take the message to heart, the witches and magicians in India would be deprived of their occupation. But if you look at the face of the woman above as she is being beaten and humiliated, loss of job seems to me to be a price she would be willing to pay.

Poem of the Day: A Man In His Life

“A Man In His Life”
by Yehuda Amichai

A man doesn’t have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn’t have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.
A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn’t have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn’t learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there’s time for everything.

Irshad Manji VS Tazim R. Kassam

Manji also blogged an additional response here.

My Observers Piece Gets Some TV Play

My piece in The Observers on Israeli army refusal has gotten some TV coverage. Check it out.

What is John McCain Doing In Israel?

Republican Presidential hopeful Senator John McCain recently visited Israel as part of the Armed Service Committee’s fact-finding mission to the Middle East. During his stay in the region (which include a prior visit to Iraq & Jordan), McCain stated his stance on Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and his commitment to the peace process between Palestinians and Israelis. McCain also expressed his understanding and sympathy for Israel’s iron-fisted response to Hamas’ rocket attacks in Israel, stating, “no nation in the world can be attacked incessantly … without responding”. While McCain did not visit the Palestinian territories, he did phone Palestinian President Muhmoud Abbas to discuss the peace process.

From The Observers, I gathered Haaretz’s Shmuel Rosner, author Joel Schalit, blogger Neo-Neocon, and Jewcy’s Daniel Koffler to ponder McCain’s recent visit to Israel. To read, click here.

Internet Addiction - A Mental Disorder?

The Ottaw Citizen is reporting on recent efforts to recognize and include internet addiction into psychiatry’s official guidebook of mental disorders (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM). The idea being that internet addicts (if they exist) experience the same type of symptoms and hardship as any other type of addicts.

“Like other addicts, users experience cravings, urges, withdrawal and tolerance, requiring more and better equipment and software, or more and more hours online, according to Dr. Jerald Block, a psychiatrist at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. Dr. Block says people can lose all track of time or neglect “basic drives,” like eating or sleeping. Relapse rates are high, he writes, and some people may need psychoactive medications or hospitalization.”

Over at Mind Hacks, a blogger dissents:

“Rather curiously, the editorial mentions the figure that 86% of people with ‘internet addiction’ have another mental illness. What this suggests is that heavy use of the internet is not the major problem that brings people into treatment.In fact, ‘internet addiction’, however it is defined, is associated with depression and anxiety but no-one has ever found this to be a causal connection.”

It seems to me that the DSM just wants to bring back masturbation and homosexuality into the fold of mental disorders (until a few years ago both where listed as mental disorders Seriously, the DSM is a book that just keeps getting fatter and fatter. Are we discovering or just inventing more illnesses?

I am not against the DSM - not one of those people who thinks there are no mental disorders - but I do think that the book has both serious weakness and strengths.

Clearly, the most invaluable strength of the DSM is that it provided the mental care community with a language, a nomenclature that it could use. Prior to the DSM there was no reliable way for to mental health care practitioners to communicate. Two practitioners looking at the same patient would use different names for the same phenomena, or the same name for different phenomena. Even as late as 1959, English psychiatrist Erwin Stengel complained that :

A…serious obstacle to progress in psychiatry is difficulty of communication. Everybody who has followed the literature and listened to discussions concerning mental illness soon discovers that psychiatrists, even those apparently sharing the same basic orientation, often do not speak the same language. They either use different terms for the same concept, or the same terms for different concepts, usually without being aware of it.”

Therefore by far the most important strength of the DSM is that it makes the whole practice of psychotherapy possible by providing a language that all can use and further their research and insights into mental disorders.

However, the most glaring weakness of the DSM is the by-product of classification and categorization. Once you have labeled someone with a disorder he/she is viewed by the outside world as a disorder. This was made very clear in David Rosenhan’s study “On Being Sane in Insane Places” (1973) in which he and seven colleges entered a number of mental hospitals as pseudopatients. The pseudopatiants entered under the pretext of hearing voices and were diagnosed as schizophrenics. However, once inside, Professor Rosenhan and his team acted completely normal. It took an average of nineteen days for each of the pseudopatient to be realized (one stayed in for forty-two days). and no member of the staff detected that they were being fooled (ironically, some patients had their suspensions). On the contrary, members of the staff often interpreted their behavior in abnormal ways. Rosenhan’s study shows the deleterious and somewhat useless meaning of term abnormal and insane. After all, what meaning can the term/category “mentally ill” actually have if those who were mentally healthy could not be differentiated from those who were sick?

If I were in charge of the DSM-V I would move from the categorical model of psychopathology to a dimensional one. As mention already, in the categorical model individual are said to either have or not have a mental disorder. Yet research has shown that normality and abnormality lie along a continuum. That is, that what the DSM has called a psychopathology is in fact an extreme variant of normal psychological phenomena and ordinary problems in living. Instead of classifying people or disorders, the dimensional model will identify and measure mood, emotion, and personal style.

It seems to me that that is the best approach with the internet addiction question as well.

Fox News Get High With Maiden

Jewno

Poem of the Day - Hope

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

- Emily Dickinson

Saudi Women Driving on the Road To Reform

Excerpts:

Today is international women’s day. (…) Yes I’m driving a car in a rural region and it is allowed for women to drive in these areas. It’s in the cities that it’s prohibited and that’s a shame because that’s where it’s needed most.
And the occasion today: I hope His Highness Prince Nayef Ibn Abdel Aziz will lift the prohibition and let us drive soon.

We, the women who’ve signed the petition that we’re sending to him today, we all hold driving licenses and we’re ready to help the Saudi state help women get their driving licenses.

According to the authorities, it’s not a question of politics or religion, but a social issue. We know that many women are able to drive and many families let them.

In light of this, I think that if we get the opportunity it will be the fastest and best way to change attitudes and make people understand that we’re ready to drive.

I hope that at the same celebration next year this prohibition will have been lifted.”