Sunday, August 23, 2015

Taxes and Benefits: The Great Disconnect

The morning papers have the same complaints and demands, year after year.  Everybody wants the government to do more for them.  The same people complain about paying taxes.  Last year about tax time we were having a staff meeting.  You should be aware that our staff are social workers for the most part, and well-educated ones at that, with a Master's degree and years of experience.  The complaint heard around the room was how once again the Department of Mental Health was taking cuts in budget, as we had for a number of years, on the grounds that tax revenues had again fallen and there simply wasn't enough money.

During a lull in the complaining I stood and asked the following question: How many of you would be willing to pay a five percent increase in your state income taxes if the money were earmarked for mental health?

Not one single hand went up. I then asked for suggestions as to how the money could be found without raising taxes.  There were a number of  suggestions, some obscene or at least impractical.
These included "stop the graft", without specifying exactly which graft was being referred  to;  another suggestion included taking it from the roads budget, although our roads are among the worst in the US.   It was clear that as a group we did  not see the direct connection between taxation and budget.  The money should come from the same place we expected it to come from when we were unemployed teenagers:  the Great Daddy, who now apparently resides in Washington.

As a people we need to reconnect our expenditures with our  income. I have a suggestion, clearly impractical since it makes sense.  We should vote on budget issues online.  Each budget expenditure should be associated with the exact amount of cost, paid by taxes, for each person's bracket.  We need to own what we choose to pay for.   Oklahoma highway bridges?  X Million total, for you personally $437.44 of your income tax. No items can be approved unless enough people vote for the expenditure out of their pockets.  Not enough voted?  The item cannot be paid  for  and we  can't have it.  Just like our personal budgets.

I can think of many possible variations on this idea. It might be disastrous for a few years, but eventually people will see the truth, that they are paying for everything the government spends out of their own individual pockets.  I suspect legislator salaries and benefits would be among the early casualties of this plan, but if I can think of that, so will the legislators,  and they will never allow that to happen as long as they vote for their own pay.

Such a plan was not practical, or even possible, in the early days  of the republic.  Distances and difficult communication were huge obstacles.  But with the internet those problems can be solved and there is no practical reason why the general public should not have a direct voice in allocation of tax moneys and expenditures.

Monday, August 10, 2015

Chronic Anger as a disorder

Fear and anger are produced in the same small and primitive part of the brain. Anger and fear are the emotional and subjective accompaniments to the emergency "fight-flight" pattern that is hardwired into our operating system. Fear and anger are what we experience when our physical machinery is ramped up to near its maximum operating speed; our bodies are ready to fight with our full power or to run at full speed. When the situation that provokes them is no longer a threat, we can "power down" and let our bodies recover. We are not designed to run at such an overload for more than brief periods of time. In wartime, for instance, prolonged periods of fear-anger result in considerable physical and mental cost which may require years of recovery.

We have defined chronic or enduring fear as an illness. We call it "anxiety" and we treat it as an illness, with medications and with various kinds of therapy. People become physically ill with the biological consequences of constant fear; they develop high-blood pressure, stress disorders of all kinds, heart problems, and so on. We have no difficulty in recognizing chronic fear as a disorder, but somehow we don't see its complement, chronic anger, as an equally damaging illness, yet we see and feel its effects constantly.

Anger and its expression are increasingly problematic in our world. In the paper we read daily of random murders, group killings, road rage, murderous and abusive relationships, and random violence. We have "Anger Management Groups" to remind people of what they learned (or should have learned) on the grade-school playground. When our anger is turned inward on ourselves in the form of self-blame, we call it depression, and we can treat it successfully. as well.

In the United States of today, we psychologists and psychiatrists diagnose many "emotional disorders", including anxiety disorders and depression. We don't define chronic anger as an illness, though it meets exactly the same criteria as the other emotional disorders do. The only related official diagnosis is "intermittent explosive disorder", which means one or more isolated instances of a temper tantrum. I want to be very clear about this: anger/frustration and fear are normal responses to situations and as such are healthy psychologically. Chronic fear and chronic anger are maladaptive responses and respond well to competent treatment, but we only recognize chronic fear as requiring treatment.

I think we don't see chronic anger as a disorder because our entire culture is permeated with anger. It's part of the air we breathe. Our television shows are about people getting angry, doing bad things, and getting punished by angry authorities. This is as true for the news on CNN as it is on the multitude of detective and police shows. Our heroes are people who have been mistreated and who then fight back, from Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood onward. Our history began with us getting mad at the English, who mistreated us, and whom we got mad at and fought back against. We love our anger. It provides us with the energy to fight without fear, to stand up to mistreatment and refuse to cooperate with abusive people. It also results in abrasive and dangerous relationships, even to those we love, and to a large assortment of physical disorders.

Does our history and culture mean that we have to tolerate constant anger among ourselves, or to find others outside our culture to bear the brunt of our resentment? Perhaps we should consider how we would be able to function, both as individuals and as a culture, without constant anger in search of a "bad guy" to punish? Can we defend ourselves without anger? Can we stop using anger as a factor in our decision-making? In reality, we may be much more effective if our responses to frustration were rational, logical and not governed by fury.

I think we should consider chronic anger as a serious disorder and plan effective treatments.

Lunacy as a defense

I read recently about the young man accused of sexually abusing children in Kenya.  His defense includes some disorganized statements about "an evil spirit" (named "Dan", I think) who apparently "made him do it".  Among many psychologists.. well, maybe just me... this is known as "The Devil Made Me Do It"/  Clearly we should be highly skepticsl of such claims. In fact, the ONLY instances of such a claim being legitimately made are if the claimant is schizophrenic.  Schizophrenia is not a part-time disease that comes and goes.  The symptoms recede with medication most of the time, but without medication the schizophrenia is full time and in every aspect of the person's life.

Schizophrenia is a real disease, and in a small percentage of cases the schizophrenic may hear "command" hallucinations, ordering him/her to do certain things. But true schizophrenia is very difficult to fake unless the person attempting the fake is both very knowledgeable about schizophrenia and a hell of a good actor. It might be noted that schizophrenia is a disorder that almost invariably develops in the young person, roughly ages 15 to 30.  So the young man mentioned above is probably in the right age range.

A lot of the symptoms consist of what the schizophrenic does NOT do or show.  People deriving their knowledge of mental illness from movies or tv invariably get it as wrong as it can possibly be, so their attempt at faking it is detected in minutes or even seconds in an interview.  Many less well-educated people think that schizophrenia has to do with "multiple personality"; they apparently think if another part of the self does the bad deed, especially if they "don't remember" that it will not be their fault and they shouldn't be punished.  So we should just punish that part of them.  Of course, the rest of the person will go to jail too.

Schizophrenia is an illness that deserves and requires treatment, not punishment.