Santos leads the GOP in eliciting Schadenfreude, no doubt more to come

 Santos leads the GOP in eliciting Schadenfreude, no doubt more to come

By Hal Brown, MSW

UPDATE: Jan. 29:

Original blog:

There's no word in English, or any other language for that matter, for the German word Schadenfreude. Following the German convention it is often capitalized, which is good since it means it doesn't need further emphasis here, although I am tempted to put it in bold. 

I experienced a delightful feeling of Schadenfreude when I read this article:

As far as I'm concerned, and I expect other Democrats too, the longer George Santos stays in the House the better. I am sure that many or most of the House Republicans wish he would just go away as quickly and quietly as possible. They may be able to sideline him but I have no doubt that he will make himself accessible to reporters eager to cover his every utterance. "If it bleeds, it leads" certainly applies to Santos, and he's hemorrhaging.

I am also watching reporters catching House Republicans being asked about Santos and enjoying watching them squirm as they deflect the questions.

Below top center, Steve Scalise:

Like Icarus, he is flying too close to the Sun

There's a hard-to-describe pleasure in experiencing Schadenfreude washing over you without a smidgen of guilt. If you feel any guilt, as a therapist myself,

 I can offer only two words for you. As Bob Newhart's Dr. Hartley shouted

 to a patient in a classic (for many therapists) clip:

I don't think it is wishful thinking to be convinced that Santos will not be the first Schadenfreude inducer as the House Republicans in the Freedom Caucus, more appropriately called the Free-to-Be-Crazy Caucus, grind the necessary business of the House to a screeching halt as they go full-steam ahead on their vengeance train. 

I don't wish death or literal injury on anyone but I am reminded of incidents like this when a train went much faster than the tracks would support.

The more-or-less not mentally unbalanced GOP House members like Jim Jordan, for all his grimacing, screaming, and screeching may have stories like this written about him...

compared to the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert. and Matt Gaetz he's an exemplar of mental stability.

The Schadenfreude with Jordan probably won't come with his swatting at hallucinatory flying pigs during a televised hearing which he chairs. While I'd like to see him turn into a quivering mass of incoherence when one of the Democrats nails him I doubt it will happen. 

What I think will occur over time is that these hearings and investigations, especially the ones on the so-called weaponization of the federal government (read why this is the most dangerous) and Hunter Biden turn into Snipe hunts. I call it Schadenfreude delayed. When it happens...

.... for Republicans, and not in a good way... it will be a nightmare filled sleep they can't wake up from.

Updates: I really hoped George Santos would stay in the House for as long as possible, his being there causing rizik tsores (Yiddish for huge suffering) for Republicans. Now it looks like his days may be numbered. The Nassau County GOP called on him to resign. This makes it harder for House GOP to dodge the issue. 

Here he is refusing to resign:

I wonder who the aide by his side, who gets in the elevator with him, is.

Amanda Marcotte Said It All About The GOP House But Her Title Put It Mildly

 Amanda Marcotte Said It All About The GOP House But Her Title Put It Mildly

By Hal Brown

The lettering above comes from one of the images used to promote one of the versions of the Ray Bradbury novel of this name.

I was resting in bed after waking up this morning and thinking about writing something about what the next two years has in store for the country as the GOP turns the house into Benghazi on a malevolent mixture of steroids and psychedelics.   

Then I read this republished Salon essay by Amanda Marcotte on RAWSTORY.  (I like reading Salon articles on RAWSTORY because the later has a comments section and the former doesn't. If you prefer you can read this piece on Salon here.)

If it was up to me I would have changed the title of her essay. Instead of 

"Call it the Conspiracy Theory Congress: Things are about to get dangerously weird on Capitol Hill"

 I would have changed it to 

Call it the Conspiracy Theory Congress: Things are about to get treacherously weird on Capitol Hill

Amanda Marcotte addressed everything I was thinking and more better than I ever could.

I urge you to read what she wrote. I thought I'd bullet-point some of what stood out and it apropos that the word "bullet" in this term used in this particular context has another meaning. These are bullets aimed at the heart of our democracy.

• The antics of various House committees, as they work hand-in-glove with Fox News to create and disseminate right wing conspiracy theories, will make an epsiode of Infowars seem downright sober-minded.
• Having realized that they'll likely never get their desired ends through democratic means, they've determined democracy itself must go. And make no mistake: McCarthy and other GOP leaders are only too happy to go along with the program.
• ...the current iteration of the GOP is functionally a fascist party and adheres to the knee-jerk fascist distaste for thinking, rational debate, and above all, letting facts guide your decision-making.
• ...they will use the immense power and resources of the U.S. Congress to be a bullshit-generating machine. 
• The hearings publicizing the conspiracy theories will be framed as "investigations," but no one should be fooled. The Republicans behind these lies, much less the right wing "journalists" who will elevate them, know full well it's all nonsense.
• The purpose of these exercises in fantastical story-telling is, if anything, more diabolical than an old-fashioned desire to fool people. It's about a larger assault on truth itself, or more specifically, on the value that truth has in our society. The goal of the "alternative facts" crowd is to make truth no more relevant than lies.
• The next two years of "hearings" will be much of the same: Lots of insinuations and false accusations, as well as incoherent ramblings that only make sense to those who are already well-versed in right wing conspiracy theories. Little, if any, effort will be put toward making any of these outlandish stories or conspiracy theories convincing. They aren't really meant to be believed. They are meant to alter the American relationship with reality so people lose all faith that the difference between true and false matters at all.

This all doesn't strike me as merely dangerous. I don't think it is hyperbole to say that treachery is what we as a nation is facing. 

Addendum 1: This is the second time I used an illustration form Something Wicked The Way Comes in a story. This is from May, 2016:

Addendum 2:

For whatever reason, Chris Hedges, the author of 

America's theater of the absurd: Our politics has become an endless carnival

Last week's power struggle between warring factions of charlatans, con men and "influencers" was only the beginning

 in Salon  decided to put, or allow to be poorly photoshopped, a clown nose onto President Biden as if he is cut from the same fascistic clothe as Kevin McCarthy and Donald Trump. 

He wrote: The billionaire class, for the most part, prefers the mask of a Joe Biden, who broke the railroad unions. But it also knows that the goons and con artists on the far right will not interfere in its disemboweling of the nation.

This is the only reference to Biden in his essay. 

This is an example of bothsidesism. He isn't comparing apples and oranges. He's comparing an apple with a small bruise with a pit of venomous vipers.

Click "Read more" to continue.

If Trump believes some of his pronouncements he may be clinically delusional

 If Trump believes some of his pronouncements he may be clinically delusional

By Hal Brown, MSW

 

I am tired of writing about Trump's psychopathology. Today's HUFFPOST story "Trump Says Biden 'Convinced' Putin To Bomb Ukraine In Mar-a-Lago Campaign Speech" prompts me to write yet another blog story about the question as to just how mentally ill the beleaguered former president might have become. 

We know he's a malignant narcissist, but how can we tell whether he is veering into becoming a delusional psychotic? 

In half of my 40 year career as a psychotherapist I worked in a community mental health center. Most of the severely mentally ill patients I worked with had been stabilized on medication so I only had a few chances to see someone exhibiting the delusions that were manifest prior to being stabilized on medications. Those times I did see patients who weren't medicated their delusions were the more typical. Several patients off medication had religious delusions and another believed a movie star was in love with him to the extent he ended up at the airport trying to board a plane without a ticket to be with his lover in Hollywood.

When a clinician does a diagnostic assessment they evaluate the patient's rational thinking and reality testing. A simple mental status exam includes the following (reference):

• Thought process
  The flow and coherence of thoughts, inferred from a client’s observable behaviors, especially speech. For example, if the client’s speech is rambling and disorganized, the examiner may infer that their thinking is also disorganized.
• Thought content
  Thought content can be inferred from spontaneous speech and direct questioning by the examiner. For example, the examiner might ask, “Have you ever heard things other people don’t hear or seen things other people don’t see?” An answer of “yes” to such questions raises the possibility of hallucinatory thought content.
• Insight
  How aware is the client of their own strengths and limitations?
• Strengths and limitations
  Traditional forms of the MSE have been designed to record any cognitive, emotional, or behavioral deficits. Consider how a clinician would fill out portions of a standard mental status form like this, in particular the parts below, for Trump:

Here's more 

Delusional disorder, previously called paranoid disorder, is a type of serious mental illness called a psychotic disorder. People who have it can’t tell what’s real from what is imagined.

Delusions are the main symptom of delusional disorder. They’re unshakable beliefs in something that isn’t true or based on reality. But that doesn’t mean they’re completely unrealistic. Delusional disorder involves delusions that aren’t bizarre, having to do with situations that could happen in real life, like being followed, poisoned, deceived, conspired against, or loved from a distance. These delusions usually involve mistaken perceptions or experiences. But in reality, the situations are either not true at all or highly exaggerated. From WebMd

Perhaps Trump is already so detached from reality that any mental health professional would diagnosis him as having a psychosis. There's no way to tell how much of his pronouncements are performances and what he really believes.

Anybody who truly cares about his well-being ought to be very concerned about his lapsing into a psychotic state. Consider what you would do if you had a loved one who was expressing some of the beliefs Trump has been expressing.

Those who consider him the leader of the GOP, those cult members who blindly follow him, should also ask themselves whether they are being led by someone who is so unmoored from reality that they may be clinically delusional.

Another question which researchers could well look into is whether someone who deliberately uses gaslighting (defined as manipulating someone so as to make them question their own reality) for their own purposes can eventually gaslight themselves.

Marjorie Taylor Greene as an example of a low information and gullible person as opposed to being delusional

Just yesterday Rep. Greene addressed her pervious belief in QAnon conspiracy theories:

Wanting to believe something is different than actually believing it. Consider the poster on the wall of the X Files' Fox Mulder's office:

If someone doesn't have the ability to apply logical thinking to beliefs like those promulgated by QAnon ( including that the Clintons were responsible for murders, that the Democratic Party was responsible for a satanic child sex trafficking ring and that the California wildfires were caused by space lasers owned by a Jewish family) and gets all their information from one-sided sources they are vulnerable to being manipulated. Nobody wants to admit they were gullible and, as MTG said, that they were "sucked into" believing something that any logical person wouldn't believe.

This doesn't mean they are clinically delusional. It may suggest that they have a low IQ but above average intelligence isn't a requirement for holding public office. 

If anyone running for a major political office had to have above a 120 IQ and pass a battery of psychological tests I venture to suggest that the GOP side of the House would look very different. To the delight of Democrats, the GOP itself wouldn't be having to deal with this guy:

Update:

 

Ben Kalom replied on this site...

Thanks for blending in criteria. This helps secure our assertions that he is not mentally fit to hold any public office.

Mentally fit - I do not believe it matters whether genetics, experiences, trauma, parenting or personal choices have led us to this place of a fellow who simply blathers about in social media. He has no ability to filter. Delusional disorders is the correct section of DSM 5-TR to be reading and giving consideration. That section, in addition to considering his personality disorder cluster, should be the hub of any diagnostic conversation wheel we use to chat about how best to manage our feelings about him, vis-a-vis his repeated insistence on being vocal on social media.

There is a misperception of who might be considered "mentally ill." What I am referring to is the first defense he threw out to his crowd, "I'm rich!" Is there something about being wealthy that magically inoculates a person against mental disorder? I would offer the converse argument. Mo' money, mo' crazy. You need sage and sound counsel to help you manage your false-bottomed sense of total safety and security while living on this planet.

Donald simply does not know when to shut the f#$k up.

I am reminded of a training video in which Dr. Sal Minuchin was interviewing a patient with disorganized thinking. To characterize just how disturbing it is to the treatment professional to work with these folks day after day, Sal could not restrain himself and uttered, "What are you talking about??" in a most directive manner, hoping to encourage the client to get back on track.

In delusional disorder, there's no thesis, no theme, no specific argument, no path that gets to anywhere. It is walking with a person who is lost in the forest and then finds yet another distraction. Being lost is the entire point of their delusion. It is how they guard against the reality of life. Life breaks through their ordinary protections with ordinariness.

THat's much, much more than they can handle.

The warning we who study the disordered persons and the qualitative/quantitative means by which they've gotten into the swamp they are in, need to heed is in the sheer number of people who are also in that swamp with him, and who came to that swamp, expecting to find a country club swimming pool. His ability to hold them in a promise of prosperity has increased whatever disordered thinking and feeling these folks experienced prior to believing his siren song.

Crazy draws more crazy to itself. There's kinship in delusional status.

Is Donald delusional? I think I agree with that assertion, and I encourage other helpers and human services workers and professionals to see the dead poseys in the hands of their clients, and although you want to be kind and offer unconditional positive regard, keep the truth in your head that no matter what else you hear, those flowers are dead.

Donald is holding out dead flowers to his followers. That's what he's selling them. Dead flowers, purporting to re-animate them and make them alive again...

If you are a realist like I am, then you see how difficult it will be to convince folks who drank his dead flower tea to walk away from believing the delusional reality they've walked through the looking glass and entered.

Below from Tibel:

Click above to enlarge