Category: Psychology

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The Diagnosis

It is so important to give it a label.

You feel tired. You are bored. You are frustrated. Maybe you’re also not very bright or ambitious. You don’t want to tell people you are tired and bored and frustrated and not very ambitious, because that would make it sound like it’s your own fault. So, instead, you have chronic fatigue syndrome.

Maybe your two-year-old is really active. He climbs up everything. He’s loud and noisy and eager and excitable. You find this annoying. But you can’t tell anyone that you find your own kid annoying or that you are too impatient to be a good parent, so, instead, you say that he has attention deficit disorder and pop some drugs into him to slow him down.  Sure, it takes away some of his energy and curiosity, but, hey, you have to get your sleep.

The diagnosis, in our society, is essential. We need that label. We need an identifier. We have to generate public belief in and enthusiasm for conditions that might be nebulous, vague, or invisible.

Why?

Well, almost every time you hear the diagnostic label being propounded, it’s by someone who makes his or her living treating it. This is why the bible of psychotherapy, the DSM III or IV or V or whatever it’s at now, always gets bigger and bigger. It never shrinks. They almost never remove “syndromes” from it. (It caused a bit of nudging and winking when they did finally remove homosexuality from their list of morbidities not all that long ago.)

And that’s why pharmaceutical companies are determined to get your kid into their slimy clutches. They are promoting the idea that a four-year-old who wont go to bed nicely when asked has some kind of mental disorder and needs to be drugged. Once your kid is used to those colorful little pills twelve times a day, they know he’ll never, ever again feel that he can handle life without some kind of narcotic assistance.  His “baseline” is obliterated.  Whatever he feels from now on will be partly due to the drugs and partly due to withdrawal from the drugs.  The perfecta of pharmaceutical self-sufficiency.

The magic of the diagnosis is clear. Some people will deny that feeling tired or frustrated or depressed is an illness. Some people might think its just part of life. You put up with it. You endure it, and get on with the things you have to do.

But it’s easy to convince people otherwise. If you have the proper label for something, people will assume that adequate research and scientific analysis has determined that this condition really exists. We trust doctors. They’ll assume that a doctor made the diagnosis, and everyone knows how smart doctors are. They’ll assume that everyone thinks it is a real condition because it has become part of the language. It becomes shorthand, to a lot of people, for complexities that are too hard to explain quickly.

When I was a lot younger, if I heard someone say something like, “he has attention deficit disorder”, I would just assume that there was such a thing as “attention deficit disorder”, and therefore we better do something about it. Now I’m a lot more skeptical, but I can remember how easy it was to accept sophisticated-sounding terms like that as if they referred to clear, objective realities.

When you look at the “symptoms” of chronic fatigue syndrome, you realize how utterly subjective and arbitrary labels can be. Tiredness. Depression. Loss of appetite. Headaches. Difficult to get up in the morning. And so on. Sounds like just about anyone’s rotten little life. Label it, and we can blame someone or something else. Label it, and we can talk multi-million dollar lawsuits. Label it and we can make a drug that fixes it. Then we are not “doing drugs”. We are doing “therapy”. We are taking the “wonder drugs”, Lithium and Prozac and Paxil, and whatever. It’s okay– we have to take these drugs: we have a condition.

The drugs, of course, don’t really fix anything. They give you a sustained high. It is one of the great myths of our society that drugs like Lithium and Prozac actually treat real conditions. That is utter nonsense. They simply make you feel good. But we have to believe in the myth, or else we would have to admit that we’re really not much better than your average drug addict or alcoholic.

Well, we’re not.

I heard some parents on the radio recently (the CBC) talking about their “hyper-active” child. The parents of this child were at their wits end. They didn’t know what to do. They went to the doctor. He prescribed Ritalin. They tried it. It worked! Hallelujah. However, their child just didn’t seem to be herself anymore. She lost her sense of insatiable curiosity. She lost her spark, her zest for life. They took her off Ritalin and tried different parenting techniques instead. From the details the father gave on the air, it was clear that he and his wife simply got better at parenting. They learned to anticipate when problems might occur. They planned ahead for family outings. They became more flexible and adaptable. Amazingly, the problems seemed to go away.

Was their child ever really “hyper-active”? If you read the definition of hyper-activity from the DSM, it is an amazingly accurate description of just about any two-year-old.

Beware of labels.

Update 2022-04-26

And I will concede that this will not a popular post.  I am regularly astounded at how many people I know are taking psychotropic drugs, and obviously I am very skeptical of their use.  I am wary of hurting people’s feelings.  But there is good reason to voice my dissent no matter how small a minority I represent.  We in danger, as a society, of building a world in which we continually anesthetize ourselves against our deepest anxieties.  We have good reason to be anxious: we are melting the ice caps.  We are promoting intolerance and bigotry.  We are more divided than ever before.  We should be anxious and the worst solution is to address our anxiety with palliatives.

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So Happy Together

So Happy Together

Come all you fair and tender maidens
Take care with how you court young men
They’re like a star on a cloudy morning
First they’ll appear, and then they’re gone

Have you ever watched those late-night dating shows, with the sleazy host who dances and leers at all these dancing women and urges you to call this number to meet them? The girls take turns preening in front of the camera and saying stuff like, “Hi, I’m Carmen, and I like hang-gliding and scuba, and I’m looking for a guy who can be sensitive but also has a great sense of humor.” And makes a lot of money.

Crass and demeaning, and depressing, isn’t it? They say that 17% of all newlyweds had sex on their first date. Well, here they all are, the 17%, giggling and wiggling and flexing their abs, just begging you to call. They want to meet people. They want to have fun. They are all employed.

They’ll tell to you some loving story
They’ll tell to you that they love you best
Straight away they’ll go, and they’ll court another
That’s the love they have for you.

I don’t mean to be sarcastic with that last remark. These women hold jobs. Good jobs. They get paid well. They can afford nice clothes and makeup. They work hard all day, and they want to party all night. One day, they probably want to settle down and have 1.2 children. They want that child to grow up quickly, with privilege and ambition, so they can get right back to hang-gliding. As soon as the baby can walk, their mothers are back on the run, taking part-time work, exercising, taking classes. Before you know it, the child’s in day-care and mom is back on the daily commute, along with dad. Whoever gets home first makes dinner.

Presuming it works out…. if the guy they’re doing this with turns out to be annoying or stupid or unfaithful, they won’t hesitate to divorce him.

How far we are from “fair and tender maidens”, a mournful, nostalgic song if I ever heard one. Fair and tender: pretty and sensitive. The tragic tone of this song could only be due to the fact that the rejected girl’s entire life was doomed because of the infidelity of her boyfriend. He’s off courting another—she gets to grow old in dire poverty, or move to London and become a prostitute. He doesn’t care if it’s her or some other girl: they’re all alike to him. He doesn’t need her. He’ll go join the army, get a new job, or run off and fend for himself.

Update that song to the 1940’s and you get the girl who gets pregnant out of wedlock. Update it to the 1950’s and you get the devoted secretary who finally realizes that her boss is never going to leave his wife. But update it to the 1960’s or 70’s and the song no longer makes sense. Though it will be a long time before she can make as much money as he does, she can move around, find a job, enroll in a different university, whatever. She won’t be pregnant because, maybe, she was smart enough to get on the pill before she started having sex with him. Maybe she’s experimented a little, with drugs, or alternative lifestyles.

And the 1990’s? Girrrrls. Tattoos. Attitude. Self-defense training. Articles in Harper’s called “Who Needs Men?”.

Some people find it tempting to think that those “fair and tender maidens” had it a lot better than our “girrrls”. In our own nostalgic fantasies, she did get married, and her husband provided for her and never strayed, and they grew old and happy together and went to church twice every Sunday and never questioned authority because God appointed governments and magistrates to restrain the evil-doers.

On the other hand, it’s hard to overlook the fact that the adult female population of London in the late 19th century consisted largely of prostitutes—women who, for various reasons, didn’t fit into our nostalgic fantasy, and had to go fend for themselves, and because they were denied access to any meaningful employment, fell into the only vocation left available to them. And as for all those “faithful” husbands and fathers… there has to be a big population of customers to sustain that many prostitutes.

Some progressive social thinkers nowadays question whether men even have a role in our society anymore. Women don’t really need them. They can go to university, get jobs, buy homes and cars, and raise children by themselves. They can decide not to have children at all. In Japan and Europe this process is already accelerating with bewildering speed—more than 50% of adults live alone in some communities. In Iceland, 65% of all children are born out of wedlock. In Japan, more and more women are refusing to marry. Many industrialized western nations have a negative birth rate.

Tonight the light of love is in your eyes
But will you love me tomorrow?

If these thinkers are right, and the social and economic forces in our culture are driving men and women into greater and greater independence, it seems likely that more and more people are going to be spending more and more time alone in the future. I think of that guy in “2001: A Space Odyssey”, living in some weird all-white apartment, eating his breakfast, watching the time warp, growing old, and dying, and being reborn as a cosmic fetus. You should see it if you get a chance. It may well be our destiny.

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School Killers

I can’t think of any sensible thing to say when two students dressed in black trench coats bundle themselves up with explosive devices and guns and set out to achieve their 15 minutes of fame by killing as many of their classmates as they can. We think the world is a pressure-cooker out there in the Stock Exchange and the Bank Towers and the Emergency Wards– it’s a pressure-cooker out here too, in our vacuous suburbs, with our mall-rat status-rated designer running shoes and gilded suburban off-road super-trucks and Hollywood heroic bionic mega-metal men with laser guided killer stilettos whipping the forces of darkness without concept, idea, abstraction, or reflection, and our moral barometric Wall-Street pressure pages of translucent stock quotes: all on a race to achieve, obtain, impress and express, communicate and digitate in the soft blue glow of television on the sideboard at dinner with whatever molecules of your nuclear family are available tonight.

So a couple of boys in their color-drained coats mull over their failures and fantasies. Those girls with the curled blonde hair, up so early to remake their faces… those studs in the Tommy Hilfiger sweats reaping their squeals and nuzzling nipples with their slam-dunks and hail marys… those geeks in the turbo pascal class hacking their uncles pims and measuring their dicks for Harvardized condoms… those fay artistes craving exclusivity through obscurantism… those achievers with the part-time jobs and daddy’s RAV on the weekends and drinking parties and future flatulent frat freaks… those fundies with their pre-school bible studies and Samaritan smiles… the fat girls leaning with desperation… those skinny girls colluding behind their compressed lips… and you just can’t get the grease off your face or the smell off your fingers or lose that dull inviscerating impression that your life is going to end in one long interminable trailer park whimper. And so you trade it all in for your 15 minutes of fame, and you’re going to be bigger than fucking Charles Whitman or Richard Speck and you’re going to know it, for who’d have thought a few hours— hours and hours — who’d have thought it’d take the police that long to find you in this gleaming chromium diaphragm of literate washfulness, here, here in the library, with the brains of your class-mates splattered around you, here among the books of which you never finished a one without thinking it was small or irrelevant, here below the sirens, and the helicopters, and the cameras, and CNN With A NEW SPECIAL LOGO AND MUSIC just for you, my sweet, now that your immortality has bled down the wires and who’d have thought it would take them four hours to find out your blood wasn’t even hot enough to face down your own killers?

And I’m curious as hell about those last moments– not even alone, like Whitman in his tower– Charles, of course, not Walt– not even alone, as if there was something you could say to each other, like Jesus, we really showed them, didn’t we– and you wouldn’t probably even be quite so obvious as to say you have their attention now, would you? What were your last words to each other? Where have they gone? Where are they now? Where are the blondes and the geeks and the jocks and the brains and those oh-so-ephemeral have everything to die for most-popular and likely to succeed barbies and kens, who formerly, obliviously, oh so vacantly, surrounded us—- yes, they noticed.

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I Want a New Drug

According to the American Journal of Psychiatry, a new drug named Paxil (paroxetine) alters the personalities of people, making them more “easy-going and cooperative”.

Psychopharmaceuticals is what they call them.

Specific serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

Don’t like your personality? It can be fixed. But remember, we are against drug abuse.

This drug is now available to doctors everywhere. They will probably be receiving colorful brochures advertising its virtues shortly. Maybe they will receive an invitation to take a free cruise to Latin America where the excellent effects of the drug can be described in luxurious detail. They will be given free samples of the drug to “try out” on patients. The drug will be expensive to prescribe. But that’s okay. Don’t worry– be happy: the American Psychological Association will be pressured to include it in DSM VI or VII or VIII or whatever, as a recommended treatment for “unhappiness”. That way, it will be covered by the real pimps of our drug culture: health insurance plans.

How far are we really from the idea that we should drug everyone in our society into placid, carefree submission? How long before we officially acknowledge that our dope laws are really concerned with stamping out competition, and not with eradicating “bad” behaviours?

It all stinks.

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Roadblocks

I’m not sure where I’m going to go with this yet, so bear with me.

I just read a brochure for something called “Landmark Forum: An exceptional Opportunity”. The Landmark Forum says that it is “a breakthrough in living. The Landmark Forum is a means of gaining insight into fundamental premises that shape and govern our lives– the very structures that determine our thinking, our actions, our values, the kind of people we can be.” Elsewhere it promises to “bring(s) a new dimension and cast(s) a new light on the situations and events that make up our lives.” You can “step beyond the limits of your identity”. Landmark claims to be based on “original theories and models of thinking”. It will give you “enhanced sense of vitality and spirit along with a greater experience of your worth”. Of course they used the word “enhanced”. Well, thank God, they at least didn’t use the word “paradigm”.

The Landmark Forum takes place over four days. You meet for three hours, break, meet, have lunch, break, go home, do it again for three more days, then go on to your “new worlds of opportunity”.

Landmark Forum, for all it’s claims of originality, is actually rooted in Werner Erhard’s EST movement of the 1970’s. It’s also related to “Large Group Awareness Training”.

I tend to puke when I read language like the stuff in the Landmark brochure, especially when I see words like “enhance”, “potential”, “effectiveness”, “results”. This is a self-improvement course. You are you. Why? Nobody knows. But we can help you be better. When we are done, you will be new and improved. You’ll be more valuable, happier, more productive. People will love you. You will have more power. You will rule the world.

I don’t know if you can make people better. Most scientists think that you are pretty well the result of your genes or your upbringing and that’s about it. Nobody has added a third category: shaped by self-improvement courses.

What happens at these seminars? You hear somebody say something like, “your life is full of people who waste your time by trying to draw you into their own petty little battles and dissatisfactions. Can you help them? No. Can they help you? No. They’re wasting your time. You need to tell this person, ‘Look, you are wonderful person and I really value you, but I can’t help you with this problem and you can’t help me, and I really have some fulfilling things to do so I can’t waste my time listening to you any more.'” And the people at the forum go, “Wow! That’s great. Why didn’t I think of that!”

I once saw a tape of the magnificent Barbara Colorosso speaking on child discipline. She draws up a scenario: your teenager wants to die her hair orange and wear baggy trousers. Everyone in the audience groans. They know about this problem. How do you get your teenager to dress the way you want them to? Barbara says, “Is it physically harmful for them to wear baggy pants? No. Is it morally harmful for them to wear baggy pants? No. Let it go. Forget about it. Why waste your authority capital on issues that don’t really matter?”

The audience goes “Wow! Why didn’t I think of that!” That’s a good question. My question is, if the audience is so smart as to know that this is good advice, why do they have to pay someone else to give it to them? Were these people so dumb that they never thought of this solution?

Part of the problem is that the problems Colorosso uses to illustrate her fool-proof methods of child-rearing are very simple and unambiguous. She is a good communicator and she gives her little mini-drama’s a remarkable sheen of elegance and simplicity that may not exist in real life. If you could talk the way Barbara Colorosso can talk, I don’t think you’d have very many problems with your kids. And I think people love her not because she solves problems for them but because she is such a good talker. She’s funny and entertaining and seems to have everything solved. She would be a good movie.

My bottom line. My main point. My theme is… no number of workshops or seminars are going to take dumb people and make them smart.

And anyway, doesn’t this sound a lot to you like religion? Take bad people and make them good. Give people a sense of meaning and purpose. Make people feel good about themselves. You would think that church people would walk right out of these seminars thinking to themselves, “No thanks, I already have some.”

Whenever I read through these materials, I always feel a bit like an alien. I’m not sure what the real point of it is.

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Passion and Disorder

In the movie, Titanic, by James Cameron, lovely Rose De Wit, played by Kate Winslet, is forced to choose between her effete, elitist, rich, snobbish, dweeb fiancé Cal, or the all natural, refreshing, spontaneous, passionate, all-American, artiste Jack Dawson.    Combined with the fact that we know that the ship does sink at the end, there is not a lot of suspense in this film.

This dilemma is so familiar you’d think we’d be bored with it by now.   When Cal takes out a pistol and tries to remove his rival by force, we’re not surprised.  He’s fighting a rigid Hollywood code: simple fisticuffs would never have sufficed.

How close to reality is this?  All you women out there: did you choose your man because he was so spirited, imaginative, and “different”? Or because it looked like he could hold a job?

There is some reality to the idea.  The phrase “Stockholm Syndrome” comes from a real life case of a Swedish kidnap victim falling in love with her captor.  Wonder how that ended.  But, other than that, in real life, does it happen very often?  Let’s see.  I’ll make a list of women I have known over the years.  How many married for “passion” and how many married for logical, rational reasons that might include material benefits?  I’m going to have to use numbers instead of names, to protect the guilty.  I don’t know the answer myself– I’m just going off the top of my head here.  Let’s define “passion” as a case in which the woman chooses someone of whom her family would disapprove for the usual reasons.  “Rational” is when a woman chooses someone with a promising future, whom her family perceives as stable and mature and responsible.

Woman #1 rational
Woman #2 rational
Woman #3 rational
Woman #4 rational
Woman #5 rational
Woman #6 rational
Woman #7 passion (didn’t work out)
Woman #8 passion (didn’t work out)
Woman #9 rational
Woman #10 rational
Woman #11 rational
Woman #12 passion (didn’t work out)
Woman #13 rational
Woman #14 rational
Woman #15 rational

Hmm.  Do I see a trend?  Maybe I think the ones whose marriages didn’t work out must have been passionate because everything else about those relationships now seems so illogical.  Maybe those whose marriages seem rational now were married in the throes of a stormy passion they didn’t display to others.

There is another factor people who watch the Titanic and get all teary-eyed should consider:  some women marry for passion, but immediately set out to make the relationship rational by pushing their husbands into new jobs, education, promotions, investments, mini-vans, quality time with the kids, and so on.  So poor Jack Dawson, had he survived the sinking, probably would have taken a job as a commercial illustrator, or, more likely, a salesman, shortly after marrying lovely Rose and getting her pregnant.  Picture Rose in 1955, wearing an ugly pant suit to a Dean Martin concert in Las Vegas, while Jack wanders off in an ugly loud shirt and pastel slacks to waste a few quarters on a slot machine.  He bumps into a Marilyn Monroe look alike who gets friendly… and considers a moment of passion.

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You’re Never Alone With a Schizophrenic*: The Myth of Sybil

More unconscious humour: at one point, the real Sybil (Shirley Mason) wrote a letter to Dr. Wilbur insisting that she did not have multiple personalities. Some critics have made much of the letter and Wilbur’s dismissal of it. But then again, which personality wrote the letter…. (To her credit, Dr. Wilbur published the letter in “Sybil”. )

Multiple Best Seller Disorder

About 25 years ago, I read a book by Flora Rheta Schreiber called “Sybil”. It was about a woman with multiple personality disorder. The good psychiatrist. Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, was able to identify 16 different personalities within the consciousness of one troubled young woman. Some of the personalities knew about the other personalities; some did not. The personalities came into being as Sybil’s way of coping with dreadful abuse at the hands of her own mother. It was an awesome book– I was fascinated.

The book created a sensation. It spawned a television movie starring Sally Field, and host of television talk show episodes. It was a big factor in the gradual popular acceptance of the idea of multiple personalities and repressed memories, both caused by child abuse, which, indirectly, led to a lot of the ideas about repressed memory syndrome and the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare in the 1980’s.

Some experts in the field have never accepted the idea of repressed memories, and, as more evidence emerges, many more people are beginning to have doubts. At the very least, most professionals have become cautious about it.

And now it looks like we should start to question the idea of multiple personalities as well: it seems that “Sybil” is a fraud.

First of all, a psychiatrist who worked with the real Sybil, wrote a book questioning the idea that she had multiple personalities. Now a psychologist, after listening to the tapes of the sessions Dr. Flora Schreiber had with Sybil, has concluded that the “multiple personalities” were actually constructions by the psychiatrist to help Sybil explain why her behaviours seemed so strange to herself. It seems that patient, doctor, and writer got carried away with the idea, and, hey, it made good television (and lots of bucks), so why not go with it?

It should be noted that Shirley Mason had read “The Three Faces of Eve”, one of the first books on multiple personality disorder (or Disassociative Identity Disorder, as the DSM called it for a while) before becoming multiple personalities herself.

Well, every time you get tempted to think we humans are pretty smart, it helps to think about something like this. A lot of people, educated and not so educated, were completely fooled by “Sybil”, and, to this day, there are a lot of psychologists out there eagerly diagnosing patients as having multiple personality syndrome or as having repressed memories, on the basis of bad science. And, remarkably, a lot of patients who insist they are MPD– remember– an acronym means it’s true– which of course makes ridiculous the claim that they are…. MPD.

*This title is borrowed from the album by Ian Hunter.

Update April 2008:

An impressive interview with Dr. Herbert Spiegel, a psychiatrist who treated Sybil for a short time, and refused to participate in the book. He observes that the idea of Multiple Personality Disorder only took hold in the U.S.

Links to More Information about the Sybil Myth

Other Hollywood Disorders
Recovered Memories

Update: May 2003

Someone reading this website recently asked me a few questions about this story. I confess that I didn’t provide enough details for anyone to check into the facts, or to do an intelligent search on the subject. Here they are:

Sybil’s real name was Shirley Ardell Mason. She was born January 25, 1923 and died of breast cancer February 26, 1998.

Her psychiatrist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, died in 1992, so she isn’t around to defend herself. But other analysts who have listened to tapes of her sessions with Mason say that Dr. Wilbur was suggestive in her therapy and that she used hypnosis.

Flora Rheta Schreiber, the author, also died in the early 1990’s.

The psychiatrist who also treated her and concluded that the multiple personality disorder label was a fraud was Dr. Herbert Spiegel. I read an interview with him in an interesting article in the April 1997 New York Review of Books, in which he stated that Sybil was merely a “suggestible hysteric”.

Another analyst, Dr. Robert Reiber, actually listened to tapes of the sessions between Sybil and Wilbur and concluded that
Wilbur planted the idea
of “multiple personality”
into Sybil’s head, possibly out
of some kind of misguided
therapeutic strategy, and possibly for dumber reasons.

Wilbur claimed that Sybil was “cured”– the book and movie both build up to that startling miracle moment when she “reintegrates” her personalities, but, as in so many similar stories that have been popularized on TV and books, that is not quite the truth. Shirley Mason followed Wilbur to Lexington, Kentucky, and continued to receive therapy for many years.

I would check the archives of the New York Review of Books.   [Wait a minute: has it been removed?  It would not surprise me.]

You could certainly argue that no popular book about mental illness has done more damage to more families than this one: Sybil. With the exception of the infamous medieval text Malleus Maleficarum.

Who profits? The royalties from “Sybil” were split three ways, between Sybil, Schreiber, and Wilbur.

According to the Associated Press, Sybil wrote a letter to Wilbur denying that she had multiple personalities.

“Wilbur had decided she was going to make the Sybil case into a book, because she couldn’t get it published in professional journals…” From an interview with Dr. Herbert Spiegel. My emphasis.

But then, Dr. Spiegel “believes” in hypnosis. But then, Dr. Spiegel describes hypnosis as something more like a some kind of self-induced “trance” state– not what you see in the movies.

Incidentally, in the same letter in which Sybil denies having multiple personalities, she also admits to making up the stories of horrendous abuse.

Where do you put that?

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Damien Echols

Unless his appeal to the Supreme Court succeeds, Damien Echols is going to die some time in the next year or two. He was charged with the murder of three little boys in the town of West Memphis, Arkansas. After a trial in which no conclusive physical evidence was presented, he was convicted and sentenced to death by lethal injection.

I think most people, even if they occasionally become aware of some negligence or corruption involving the police, generally believe that justice gets done and that bad guys get caught and life goes on. Give a thought, if you will, to Damien Echols, and to Guy Paul Morin, and David Milgaard, and Donald Marshall.

The most disturbing thing about the Guy Paul Morin case to me was not that the police made a mistake. (If you believe the police themselves, 99% of the time they are faultless.) It is the fact that the methodology used in handling the evidence was designed not to investigate the crime and identify a suspect, but to make a case against a suspect they had already decided was guilty. And they decided he was guilty because, well, he was a little weird. He was single and lived with his parents. He liked to play the recorder. And with the public very upset about the rape and murder of little Christine Jessop, there was a lot of pressure on the police to make good their mandate as protectors of the weak. Maybe they really believed Morin did it. Maybe they were happy to have a reasonably believable case. Maybe they were just plain incompetent. The bottom line is, the evidence against Morin was never very good but the police and the crown attorneys decided to pursue the case against him anyway.

If you look closely at the Donald Marshall and David Milgaard cases as well, the similarities are striking: shady informants, suppressed evidence, and intimidated or bribed witnesses. In each case, the police decided first who the suspect was. Then they seemed to see their task as that of playing a game, moving the correct pieces along a board until they had achieved the desired result, a conviction, without any regard for the truth. Along the way, they consciously discarded any evidence which might have implicated other suspects.

The pattern is repeated in the Damien Echols case in Arkansas, except the circumstances are far more egregious than they were in any of the three recent Canadian wrongful convictions.

On May 6, 1993, the bodies of three eight-year-old boys (Steven Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore) were found in a creek in Robin Hood Hills near West Memphis, Arkansas. The police investigated of course, but couldn’t identify a suspect. In fact, it appears likely that they let the man slip right through their fingers, when an officer was called to a local restaurant after a man covered in dirt and blood entered the woman’s washroom. The officer refused to go in and the man left. Blood samples taken the next day were conveniently misplaced by the time the trial rolled around.

With no other likely suspects at hand, the police turned the focus of the investigation onto Damien Echols, a local teenager who was known to be “different”, by local fundamentalist Christian standards. Damien wore his hair long, dressed in black, listened to heavy metal bands like Metallica, and talked weird. The cops were familiar with him and didn’t like him. And some of the cops, fresh from a workshop led by a hopelessly inadequately trained “psychologist” on satanic cults, became convinced that Damien was their man.

I won’t go into all the details of the pathetically incompetent investigation, the politics, the leaks to the press, the intimidation, the bloodlust of the citizens. The details are available on the Internet at www.gothamcity.com/paradiselost.

Better yet, there is a riveting documentary on the case called Paradise Lost. Suffice it to say that the police had their suspect…. but no evidence. This might prove to be an obstacle to the average citizen, but the West Memphis Police were nothing if not resourceful. They pressed forward with the case anyway. Jurors aren’t necessarily bright, and the defense lawyers in town are even dumber than we are. What if we just make the guy look like some kind of weirdo Satan worshipper? Then we won’t need any evidence:

The judge took one look at the prosecution’s hopelessly inadequate “case” and tossed it out right? In America, you can’t convict someone of a crime without proof, right? Yeah, right. Maybe in a Disney film. The police tried to pressure Damien into a confession, but he was too smart for them. Well, how about Jessie Misskelley, a boy distantly acquainted with Damien, and very susceptible because, after all, he had the mental age of a five-year-old. It only took eight hours of relentless intimidation to get Jessie to sign away all his rights and make a “confession”. Never mind that the confession was incorrect about all the important details of the crime, and never mind that, as a developmentally delayed youth, his constitutional rights were ignored. The confession implicated Damien and Jason Baldwin and the two were arrested. And once Jessie realized that he was not going to be freed in exchange for his “help”, as promised, he immediately recanted his confession and denied any involvement. And never mind that he was placed by witnesses 30 miles away from the crime scene at the time the murders were committed… well, you get the idea.

The odd thing is that the dubious confession wasn’t even admitted into evidence at the trial of Damien and Jason. And without the confession, there was virtually no evidence at all. No motive. No weapon. The police couldn’t even demonstrate that they knew where the crime had taken place. The prosecution merely characterized Damien as a member of a Satanic cult (he was actually interested in Wiccan, not Satanism) and let slip that Jessie Misskelley had confessed and been convicted for the crime as Damien’s accessory… and the jury, which surely barely exceeded Jessie’s capacity for reasoning, convicted him. Even more preposterously, Jason Baldwin was convicted, apparently for the simple reason that he was a friend of Damien’s.

Damien was sentenced to death by lethal injection, Jason to life imprisonment. It is only through the good fortune of having HBO present with their cameras that their predicament got any attention at all. Even so, the appeal to the Arkansas Supreme Court (howdy y’all) failed, and Echols’ only hope right now is an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, loaded with all those tough-on-crime justices that Reagan and Bush have been appointing for the past fifteen years.

It is hard to have any faith in humanity after becoming acquainted with all the facts of this case. But, hey, let me really add to your cynicism:

  • Mark Gardner, a fellow death-row inmate at Arkansas State Prison, has confessed to repeatedly raping and beating Damien Echols.
  • Damien Echols’ parents separated after the guilty verdict. In the fall of 1993, two men argued over Echols’ mother, Pam, while his father watched. One man shot the other dead.
  • Mr. Misskelley, Jessie’s father, inadvertently destroyed his house trailer while trying to move it in the summer of 1995. Later he accidentally set fire to himself and was burned over 75% of this body.

The families of the victims did not fare much better.

  • Melissa and John Mark Byers were arrested for burglary.
  • John Byers, who admitted beating his son with his belt the day of the murders, was charged by a neighbor with whipping their five-year-old boy with a fly-swatter and firing shots at their house.
  • Mrs. Byers was later charged with assaulting a pair of carpet installers after threatening them with a shotgun.
  • In March 1996, Mrs. Byers died under suspicious circumstances. It took more than six months for a toxicological analysis to be completed: it showed significant levels of an illicit drug was in her system at the time of death. Mr. Byers moved away, complaining about how weird his neighbors were.
  • Diane Moore ran over and killed a 26-year-old woman and was charged with vehicular manslaughter.
  • Terry Hobbs beat his wife with his fists, was confronted by his brother-in-law, whom he shot in the abdomen, and was charged with aggravated assault.

These are the normal, law-abiding citizens the police in West Memphis sought to protect from the deadly and dangerous Damien Echols?

From the documentary, Echols, who dominates the second half, comes off as the most intelligent and articulate persons in West Memphis, which, I guess, does make him “different”. But he was foolish enough to be cryptic, though honest with the police and in court when he would have been wiser to be silent. His attorneys did not adopt a wise strategy and it is only in comparison to them that the prosecution’s efforts resembled a “strategy” at all.

It is hard not to despair for humanity. First there is the atrocity of the murders, and the fact that the perpetrator is still free. Then there is the graceless lust of the victim’s families for revenge. Then there is the gross incompetence and negligence of the police. The hack of a judge. The phony “expert” on Satanic cults. The gullibility of the jury. The facetiousness of the Arkansas Supreme Court. The disgusting political machinations of senior politicians who fear that a concern for justice will be misinterpreted as softness on crime. The subsequent disasters in the lives of the victims.

A sensitive person could be forgiven for wanting to opt out of the human race. Let me confess that when I was younger, especially when I was in college, I thought there was a certain worldly-wise cache to this kind of cynicism. Secretly, we assumed that we would be proven wrong, that the world could be better, and that we would be admired for being aloof from it all. Well, I’m over 40 now, and the glamour of it has worn very thin indeed. Nowadays, it’s just depressing.