Now that you’ve all had time to come up with your own punch lines… here’s the guy who last floated to the surface of the Wingnut Wurlitzer cesspool yelling at the President, as reported by Emma Roller sitting in for Dave Weigel:
President Obama convened a mental health conference today to encourage a national conversation about mental illness, including a public service announcement campaign targeted at young people and veterans. If you think that sounds fairly innocuous, the Daily Caller’s Neil Munro is here to straighten you out:
President Barack Obama urged depressed, stressed and disturbed Americans to depend on the U.S. governmentâs growing corps of taxpayer-funded mental health professionals.
That phraseâ”taxpayer-funded mental health professionals”âseems to hint that a simple PR campaign to treat mental illness would lead to Obamacare Creep, even though the majority of mental health treatment is paid for through private insurance.
But the real meat of the story is Munro’s assertion that anxiety and depression aren’t real illnesses…
As a liberal in good standing, I am now required to point out that being a major douchcanoe isn’t actually a mental illness — it’s a lifestyle choice, albeit one you’d prefer didn’t show up in your own family tree.
NotMax
Philosophy choice (albeit a retrograde, patchwork and crappy one, replete with more holes than a sieve), perhaps.
The prophet Nostradumbass
As was mentioned in a previous thread, that whole load of crap is positively L Ron Hubbard-like.
Anne Laurie
@NotMax: Think back to the major douchcanoes you have met IRL. These individuals’ existence revolves around being douchcanoes, to a degree that most hardcore fundamentalists in more socially acceptable religions can only envy. They inevitably go out of their way to demonstrate their allegiance to the Douchcanoe Code even in situations where less dedicated individuals would simply shut up & go with the flow…
(/tongue so severely in cheek as to protrude from the vulgar bodily orifice)
NickT
@NotMax:
Lifestyle choice, because philosophy implies some sort of practice of reason, which is the last thing Neil Munro does or wants to do.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@The prophet Nostradumbass: Actually, I just realized that the “previous thread” I was thinking of was on Lawyers, Guns and Money. D’OH.
NotMax
@Anne Laurie
Douchecanoe, while being probably fun to say, doesn’t convey any differing meaning to me that a*hole would.
So far as IRL goes, happy to say I haven’t encountered any such in person in many a moon.
@NickT
There’s the rub.
To its stolid practitioners, it reeks of reason.
To the (thankfully) majority of thinking folk, it just reeks.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
That is a fine piece of humor. Yes it is.
piratedan
not to mention that if these people get treated, then they might not want to buy guns, can’t have that
Linda Featheringill
The folks that are truly taken care of at public expense are vets. I suppose Mr. Munro resents that expenditure, too.
Aside from the moral obligation to care for those who are damaged while trying to protect the rest of us, there are practical reasons for spending money on psych care for vets.
We teach these soldiers how to kill and then bring them home and turn them loose in a society that is just filled with guns. Dumb move.
Godwin and etc. but damaged and ignored vets of WWI supplied Brownshirts for Hitler.
Linda Featheringill
Besides, you can have my fluoxetine when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. :-)
Todd
As usual, the Slate article missed the biggest bit of nutpicking it could have done (plus, it looks like they made a couple of big errors). From Munro’s original crapwork:
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/03/obama-urges-public-to-use-government-mental-health-programs/#ixzz2VEUAedsF
fuckwit
Based on what’s going on in Turkey, I’ve been re-watching this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTm8YVUpLUE
? Martin
Compare and contrast:
Would never work here. The lack of a firearm is a telling clue that this is some kind of socialist plot. The wingnuts would see right through it.
sm*t cl*de
stigmatizing unemployment
Feeling bad about the way your country is run? Never mind, beat up on the unemployed. Perhaps some of them will blame themselves rather than the economy.
Todd
@sm*t cl*de:
The comments to the article are great. Most of them are terrified that it will be used to take their guns.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
Deacon Jones is dead. I got through life without having the man plant me. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It’s probably a bit of both.
raven
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
raven
Keith
After Newtown when Obama was pushing gun control, mental illness was what they wanted to tackle to prevent another Newtown. Then Obama wanted to tackle mental illness too, so they’re all ‘suck it up, faker’ now. Total cynicism.
gene108
Plenty of non-wingnut loons believe mental illness isn’t a real illness, but rather some sort of deficiency of internal fortitude, because person ‘x’ gets the seemingly Biblical Job treatment with his/her life and soldiers on, while person ‘y’ doesn’t have it as bad, but has a breakdown.
The stigma around mental illness is pretty significant and though Munro doesn’t help, his attitude exists across large swathes of society in one form or another.
I personally have no clue about how to remove the stigma around mental illness, but Munro’s attitude is common place across enough of society that it isn’t just a right-wing point of view.
Robert
As someone who has recovered from clinical depression and currently deals with anxiety, I want to write a screaming diatribe against the idiot at The Daily Caller. Then I remembered it’s The Daily Caller. Then I decided to read the comments anyway.
I’ll be in the corner weeping for humanity if anyone needs me.
Elizabelle
Beatriz in El Salvador delivered her baby daughter, born without a brain, by caesarian section this morning.
Baud
How they see it
JPL
@Elizabelle: Independent online news had this gem
Claudia Handal, a spokeswoman for the anti-abortion group Red Familia, said the rights of all had been respected. âWe’re very happy because as we said from the beginning, it wasn’t necessary to perform an abortion, the point was to respect the baby’s life and to give Beatriz the care and the right to health that she deserved,â Handal told Reuters.
How Claudia can sleep at night, I don’t know. Maybe she self medicates because the baby had no life. The only chance at life was for the mother. So as long as you carry the child, six plus months, you can choose to have a c-section and it’s okey dokey for all.
JPL
@Elizabelle: Here is quote from another article on iol
âIt is very clear at this time that the pregnancy intervention is not an abortion, it is an induced birth, which is something else,â Rodriguez told a news conference.
Patricia Kayden
@Keith: Exactly. Didn’t the NRA/Rightwingers claim that it was mental illness and not access to guns that caused the Newtown tragedy? So President Obama convenes a panel on mental illness and Rightwingers attack away. Sigh.
RSA
I expect Munro is a fan of Thomas Szasz, author of The Myth of Mental Illness, who argues in part that some forms of what are called mental illness are judgments of behavior, not of something you could diagnose by looking at the brain and its function. (As I understand it. I think this view is wrong. Interesting as a philosophical argument, but basically wrong.)
Kay
I don’t think it’s Obamacare “creep”. The thing is designed to increase access to mental health care.
Hopefully it works, and if it does I’d brag about it rather than apologizing.
I think it will probably save money, because poor people who are mentally ill and untreated end up in the court system and in jail. Right now our “crisis mental health” responders are police officers.
WereBear
The first step in getting over a lousy childhood is admitting you had one.
Did your parents yell at you, make fun of your needs, and then not meet them? Then just suck it up, you sissy.
The funny thing is, the wingnuts, at least, do not “stoically endure.” They whine and cheat and steal.
Elizabelle
@JPL: Red Familia is lucky they got a live mother with their doomed baby. This time.
Beatriz’s right to health. Positively Orwellian , in Handal’s use.
Health ministry’s statement interesting too. They had supported Beatriz in her quest for a termination.
aimai
@The prophet Nostradumbass: Yup.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay: Part of our problem with homelessness is that mentally ill people who cannot function in society without treatment are currently dumped on the streets.
aimai
@gene108: Apparently, like everything else for right wingers, you will have to have a child come down with something before you can begin to care. And even then, if its a question of your child’s life and happiness or your social standing in the right wing community or something contstitutional like the right to rip off your neighbors and destroy the environment, little bobbie or susie had better learn to walk that schizophrenia off right quick.
Kay
@Omnes Omnibus:
There’s that, but there’s a whole layer below that. For family members, there’s no one else to call. Police here do way more social work than police work. Between substance abuse and mental illness, it’s a huge chunk of their job.
It’d be great if we could avoid the call in the first place, if they were treated
jibeaux
Now to be fair, conservatives can be very supportive of talking about treatment for mental illness right after a mass shooting and they really, really, really don’t want to talk about guns. Oddly, the momentum is never sustained as far as actually doing anything…..headscratcher, huh?
aimai
@Kay: Yes, its terrible to read the struggle that families have to handle, protect, and care for mentally ill family members–especially children. Especially as the child grows to be physically bigger and stronger than the caretakers, or outlives the caretaker generation. Police are often called as a temporary measure to restore order or control. I shudder every time I see one of those extremely frequent “tasered to death” stories because very often that is at the root of it. A family member or a neighbor called to get a little help with a noncompliant or out of control loved one and the police turn it into a tasering or shooting offense.
Elizabelle
Interesting to me that I would think your average wingnut is a person of faith. Faith in a God whose existence cannot be proven, in a Constitution that may or may not say what the wingnut believes to be in there.
So: faith in the unseen: more predominant, perhaps, in a wingnut. (Which is why they say we’re into political messiahs. Projection.)
BUT very little faith in mental illness, which cannot always be seen, although a lot of science is there.
Or maybe wingnuts are intensely rational on this. Take away mental illness, and you take away some forms of religious experience.
It would seem Cotton Mather was bipolar, at least, if memory serves.
I guess the derision over mental illness comes down to a lack of empathy, and indifference to other people’s plight.
Which circles right back to “wingnut.”
brantl
Douchecanoe belongs in the lexicon.
Bill E Pilgrim
Of course they’re outraged. Calling for treatment and alleviation of mental illness is a direct attack on the entire modern day Republican Party.
.
JPL
@Elizabelle: this.. It is a lack of empathy.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Elizabelle: “Well, the important thing is that he’s a man of faith!”
Eric U.
@Omnes Omnibus: we went to a convention in downtown Denver, and the nice pedestrian mall was like a mental health ward. If you can tell that a person is mentally ill by the way they ask you for $.50, it’s amazing that they can live on the street.
Kay
@aimai:
Here, it’s that they don’t get any treatment at all. They don’t even have a family member who would consider “treatment” as an alternative to crisis after crisis. It isn’t really stigma. It’s ignorance. I sort of understand it. They’re so busy responding to constant crisis they never have the chance to step back and think about why it’s happening.
Some of our police are really good dealing with it, too. They know it’s mental health (they get the same calls from the same addresses over and over) and they’re actually good social workers.
Politically, this theme is familiar to me, Republicans as “daddy” and Democrats as “mommy”. I just don’t apologize for it anymore. I think Republicans are out of step. I think the country is further along than sneering at mental health. There is a LOT of mental illness. A lot of people are are involved. I think most of us are past these big, abstract pronouncements conservatives make, sneering about “society” and are instead looking for practical efforts. The fact is a lot of this work falls to police. Does it belong there? Probably not. If that’s somehow less “manly”, I’m not apologizing for it.
Elizabelle
@Bill E Pilgrim:
poor little lamb
gene108
@aimai:
I think this attitude of keeping up appearances is far more wide spread than just a wing-nut phenomenon. I think people of all social stripes and backgrounds, at some level, want their child to succeed and compare the child to other children they know, who are the same age.
They do not want to admit the problems their child may have is due to clinical depression, because they cannot understand why the child would be clinically depressed, when others in the child’s peer group are not.
Since there are no biologically measurable way (blood work, biopsy, etc.) to determine depression and you’ve provided a lot for your child – as much as other parents you know – you assume there is some sort of a attitude problem in the child or some such and don’t think it’s due to a chemical imbalance in the brain.
Citizen_X
So, the guy who yelled at the President is now yelling that there’s no such thing as mental illness? Please continue, Mr. Munro.
Uncle Cosmo
Far Wrong Mental Health Treatment:
1. Feel sad? Pray!
2. Still feel sad? Pray harder, dammit!
3. Still feel sad? God hates you–get used to it!
I had a colleague many years ago–big, bluff, bright guy–who suffered from Tourette’s. Medication controlled the worst of the sudden motions & obscene outbursts, & he had a long & productive career. Fucking wingnuts would have ordered up an exorcism & then tossed him out into the desert when that didn’t work.
(I asked him once if he blanked out during those episodes. No, he replied, I’m conscious, I just can’t do anything but wait till it’s over. I couldn’t just give him a hug–we weren’t close & it was a man thing and the 80s–but now I regret not having at least clapped him on the shoulder in solidarity.)
greennotGreen
@Elizabelle: I would like to expand on the “person of faith” angle.
There are those of us who attribute our sense of the ineffable in how we experience reality to something we call “God.” How each of us conceives of that “God” is different and personal. That personal sense of reality may or may not affect how we live our lives. For example, while I am a person of faith, I doubt that my reason for believing that I should pay taxes so the government can afford to help those in need is any different than that of an atheist who wants to live in a decent society and leave the world a better place. I’m not doing it to avoid hell.
Then there are those who seek clarity and fear ambiguity. They cling to fundamentalist religious belief because then they don’t have to make tough moral decisions themselves; those decisions are already laid out in their holy book. Interestingly, the “correct” way to interpret those scriptures is right in line with the most conservative tenets of the society the fundamentalists live in. This holds for Christianists as well as Islamists. Not coincidentally, fundamentalism is often a refuge for the mentally ill who need structure for their irrational thoughts.
These are two different things. The former is spirituality and internal. The latter is religion and external. Please don’t use the religion of some to damn the spirituality of others.
Elizabelle
@greennotGreen:
Very well stated. Agree with you on the differences between faith, spirituality and (much of established) religion.
The Moar You Know
Shit, federal government payments to mental health care providers pretty much was ended before Clinton ever got into office. I don’t know what this sociopath is ranting on about “taxpayer-funded mental health professionals”, as they literally do not exist.
Villago Delenda Est
There really is nothing wrong with Neil Munro that can’t be cured by severing his head from his body with a broadsword.
Villago Delenda Est
@Kay:
This is the thing. We’re willing to work on the situation. “Conservatives”, however, being lazy moochers, are not.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Fundamentalism was started as a kind of therapy for depression back in the day before there was physiologists and drugs to treat it(read about Oliver Cromwell) Basically the idea was to scare the patient with stories of being ass raped in Hell for all eternity so badly their fear overrode their depression. Therefor in their minds physiologists are evil and gay because they want to deny the healing terror of god’s message. So that’s were these dochbags are coming from.
Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.)
As somebody who’s dealt with depression (which is a mental illness) for 15 years and has been ADDled all my life (and I think ADD is a mental condition, not an illness, and there’s a big difference), all I can say is that that guy can kiss my sanctified ass.
Cluttered Mind
I would like to make the modest proposal that Neil Munro’s problems (and ours) could all be solved if he marries one of Walder Frey’s daughters.
RaflW
“…the U.S. governmentâs growing corps of taxpayer-funded mental health professionals,” many of whom ride communist bikeshares to work each day…
They may as well go all-in, don’tcha think?
Lori
@gene108: Yes, yes, yes.
I think there’s an additional layer to this, namely, parents don’t want to admit their part in their child’s depression or anxiety. Parents’ decisions have a profound effect on their children, good or bad, intentional or not. I’m sure many parents of depressed/anxious children, like mine, don’t have the courage to own up to their part in their child’s mental illness. I’m not talking about assessing blame, that’s not helpful, but only about finding the root causes of mental illness.
pseudonymous in nc
Yeah, like the taxpayer-funded psychologists at the VA who will be treating Iraq and Afghanistan vets with PTSD for the next 60 years or so.That’s a gift that keeps giving.
The Daily Fucker is just a wingnut welfare trolling operation.
pseudonymous in nc
@RSA:
Szasz’s work needs placing in context, the context (1961) being mental hospitals, Nurse Ratched, ECT and lobotomies, Thorazine and Valium, Haldol and Nardil. He’s often associated with the anti-psychiatric strain in Scientology, and founded the CCHR in collaboration with them, but always denied being a Scientologist or endorsing their beliefs and practices.