Discussion → Criminology and Healing

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Aug 08, 12:24am

  
  

  I get upset that psychiatry is supposed to diagnose and control would-be criminals and yet it also diagnoses victims of crime. It locks them together in perpetuity.

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• 
  Gloria Garfunkel

  Aug 08, 03:49pm

  
  

  Criminals are not mentally ill. They may claim insanity but it has zero to do with the DSM. It is a legal term. Criminals are by and large sociopaths, a personality disorder that is completely untreatable as it causes no distress to the criminal. Pedophiles are sociopaths so they aren't treatable either. Sociopaths completely lack a sense of empathy and there's no way to fix that. PTSD from a crime is a diagnosed medical condition.

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• 
  Ann Bogle

  Aug 08, 07:03pm

  
  

  [from my comment to James Claffey about his fine story, "the way her neck angled"]:

  "I have such a distaste for crime. I wish my distaste for it, out of key with the rest of society, had a label or a name. Pacifist? Mental case pacifist. That's not the latest stereotype.

  "Mental illness related? Crime. Killer. I guess some people are killers of women, of people. Hayfever doesn't cause it, right, fear of second heart attack, anger at having cancer?"

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• 
  Ann Bogle

  Aug 08, 07:47pm

  
  

  PTSD. I was mugged at near gunpoint in Houston after d'x, and as a biochemical experience, none quite like it, adrenalin shot straight to my forehead like mercury and turned me into a stiff, but I could drive after it happened. The mugger was arrested soon afterward thanks to the Queer Patrol, a band of them out walking with a hand-held radio device, before cell phones, organized in response to anti-gay violence, who heard the mugger raise his voice in his demand for my friend's purse, and called it in. My relief that he was arrested was supplanted later by my friend's making a misleading report of the crime to the police, a process that lasted two months or so. In court, the prosecutor thanked me for coming in emotional support of my friend. The courtroom was packed with families. I told the prosecutor that I was there for myself as well, because we had been mugged at my car while in my car, and the prosecutor said, "It's not in the record that you were there." My friend adamantly resisted telling me why she had reported that she was on the street alone near her apartment when it happened. The mugger had no lawyer. He was Spanish-speaking, from Mexico, previously deported, in his late teens, that is what I heard.

  The day after it happened I went to school to teach and friends ran up to me in the hall and asked if I had heard about it, and I said, "I was there." What I had said to her when we turned the corner in the car and saw the police cars and the stringer from The New York Times, there to cover crime in Houston, and the Queer Patrol, and the stunned mugger still holding her purse: "It's a ballet. It's the circle of justice. This is so good for me to see. I have been raped and this is the only time I have seen an arrest after a crime against me."

  Initially, not PTSD, because he was arrested and we were not shot and her purse was recovered intact. No property damage to my car. Later, it was disbelief. PTSD is partly related to denial by others that crime has taken place or silence surrounding it. Did she think, did the police officer (who happened to be from her CA hometown and of the same ethnic background) think that I had to be edited out of a crime as a victim and why? Because I was d'x'd with bipolar? Not in a credible position to report a crime? Did she want to be a solo survivor of the experience, to sue the family alone if there were a way? To insinuate rape? He got 15 years. The experience caused me to empathize with the wrong party. And there were consequences to that empathy later.

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• Luis Lemus

  Aug 23, 01:34am

  
  

  I am a high-functioning pre-TSD. Would love to read more of this story, the consequences and aftermethamatics.

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