The Criminological Mind

Pre-schoolers are being diagnosed with mental illnesses at an alarming rate.  Because of these types of diagnoses, they are being prescribed anti-psychotic medications.  Most of the medications being prescribed to children are made for adults.  The doctors who prescribe these medications do not know the affects that the medications will have on the developing brain of a toddler, yet they still prescribe such medications.  The youtube video tells the story of a seven year old little boy who has been showing signs of psychosis since he was a couple months old according to his adoptive parents.  His biological father was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder so the young boy was thought to have a manic depressive disorder also.  He lashes out, physically harms his parents, throws objects, screams and on one occasion he tried to “kill” his little sister with a metal shovel.  Obviously, this child has issues.  The parents and his doctor felt like the appropriate course of action would be to put him on adult anti-psychotic drugs.  When he was three and a half years old he was diagnosed with ADHD and a mood disorder.  The drugs that were prescribed for this disorder did not help his outbursts at all.  His doctor then put him on an adult medication that is often prescribed to people who suffer from bi-polar disorder.  This medication worked to calm his mood but in the video he was nodding off and spacing out while trying to focus on eating his dinner.  This relates to the Conrad and Schneider piece “From Badness to Sickness:  The Medicalization of Deviance.”  This child clearly has some mental instabilities and could use some help.  In some cases regular childhood tantrums and such behavior is written off as deviance when it should not be.  I do believe that there are instances where a child should be medicated (this instance being one of them).  But, how much medication is too much medication when it comes to a child?

youtube.com/watch?v=EnJQLZ8Cf8E

Female sex offenders are thought to have a different psychological make-up than male sex offenders.  There was the case of a teacher named Debra Lafave in Florida.  She was having a sexual affair with one of her fourteen year old students.  Lafave is outwardly attractive and a reporter who spoke about this case called her “a living barbie doll.”  So if a woman is physically attractive, what would cause her to have to sexually abuse a child?  Well, according to psychologist Dr. Alan Lipman, female sex offenders have a different reason for sexually abusing other people.  Lipman says that women sex offenders “do not develop sexually in the same way as other women do, so inside they are still very young sexually.”  I find it very odd that a psychologist would say this.  For one, I think that this statement generalizes women sex offenders into a group of sexually-immature individuals.  This psychologist seems to be excusing the behavior of female sex offenders and stating that the reason why they molest children is simply because they are sexually immature.  I believe that women sex offenders are much like male sex offenders and that there is really no difference between the two rather than genitalia.  I can imagine that the same amount of intimidation and force is used by both female and male sex predators.  This video speaks to the readings we read “Deviance Gendered, Criminology Exposed” and “Murder in the Feminine:  Marie Lafarge and the Sexualization of the Nineteenth-Century Criminal Woman.”  I believe that female criminals have similar psychological mindsets as male criminals.

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=2187105#.UCv5HallTUc

After reading this article, I feel as a person living in today’s society feel a little sad and disappointed.  To me this plain outright sounds ridiculous.  How can you compare a walk or gait to something and concrete as a fingerprint or DNA.  Is it me or is society trying every possible way of identifying a criminal in any possible way.  Making any irrelevant thing we do on a day to day basis a way of identifying us or linking it to something to refer us to a category of some sort.  The article says that every person has a their own unique way of walking and that you can use technology to help recognize what kind of walk to who it is.  But I do not think that is right in saying you can relate a walk to a type of person.  Just because someone who walks a certain way does not mean that all people who walk the same way are also the same person.  For instance, a child who follows a rigorous training in a sport develops a certain type of gait and another child the same thing, but one becomes a criminal and the other does not.  That does not mean the one child who is not a criminal will eventually be one and a walk has no link to a mental reasoning behind criminality.  And who says a person committing a crime will have the same exact walk when is doing the crime to when he strolls along everyday.  The argument is invalid to me.

Mississippi Schools Sending Kids To Prison For Misbehaving In The Classroom

In this article it is said that the Department of Justice on Friday uncovered a so-called “School-to-Prison pipeline” in Mississippi, where teachers and principals are shipping off children into the criminal justice system for infractions as small as a dress code violation. A dress code violation!!!!!!!!!! And it is not to my surprise that these students are…black and disabled. Apparently this is not only taking place in Mississippi, but in Atlanta and in schools in New York. I know of a school (I will not name it) where the principal said he would much rather suspend students for the small things that they do, rather than have them suffer for the big things. This philosophy is to try to teach the kids what? That for running in the hallway they could be suspended from school. What administrations are not realizing is that suspensions are on permanent records, which colleges see. If this effort is targeted towards blacks and disabled students (which probably have been labeled as ADD or ADHD students)  given medicines that they probably have not needed and that has effected them and have caused other reactions.

Even worse now these students now have a criminal record. What can they do with a criminal record now? They cannot go to college or get a great job, because these schools have decided to come down too harshly on these students.

This quote is at the end of the article and it summarizes my sentiments in regards to this problem, “Schools are supposed to be sanctuaries of education, and the threat of being sent to prison for a minor infraction likely discourages attendance for some at-risk youth.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGX7uKXDMT4&feature=player_embedded#!

I did not finish seeking out the rest of the videos of this lecture.  I feel that this part was efficient enough to get to the point.  Prof. Amos Wilson talks about how drugs is just being placed upon you by those you trust.  The doctor says or the state says, that is how we go by.  Because a person shows signs of misconduct, he or she is automatically sick in some way.  There is something not normal about this child or person and we need to cure them.  Even though they actually are just being a little overactive.  He further explains how when there is a change in the brain, it is nothing but an experience the brain is gaining and reacting to it and becoming stimulated, it should not be said to be a problem or sickness.  Society is helping the brain change and they also make the claim of saying there is something wrong.  So it is not the children that has the problem, it is society.  Society puts the blame on the children having problems just because they do not want to try and help, putting a label on them and having it packed away in a easy to resolve situation.  Your child is loud and disruptive, he needs to be treated for something.  It is just a quick fix solution to those who want the easy way out of a situation and if it hurts someone it does not affect them because these people are fixing them for normal society.

In the aftermath of the recent mass killings of Aurora, Colorado and Oak Creeks, Wisconsin, many Americans are left with the ever looming questions. Were the killers evil or insane? What drove these individuals to such violence? What were their motives and intentions? Were these acts fueled by hate or were they simply the bi-product of an insane mind paired with what some may call less then adequate firearm laws? We are left with the cold and less then comforting reality. The true motives for such horrendous acts against society will forever be locked in the minds of those that committed them. It seems to be the trend, that when we are exposed to such extreme acts of violence and we find ourselves lacking explanation, too often we resort to labeling them simply as evil. In this article, Mass Murderers are Insane but not Evil; author Fay Weldon makes a compelling argument to the motivation of those that commit mass killings.

This June 2010 article is posted on the web site of The Telegraph, a British news agency. In this highly opinionated news account, Weldon analyzes the reasoning of the 2010 Cumbria shooting spree, which left twelve people dead, and twelve others severely injured. Like both the Colorado and the Wisconsin killers, Derrick Bird acted alone in his violent rampage. According to author Weldon, though his acts of violence were nonetheless horrifying, he was not evil. She goes on to state that by calling “Derrick Bird as “evil” is too easy: it’s to claim he was possessed, to shrug and say there is nothing to be done about the faults in our society, the horrors of its fantasy life and the anxieties of its real one. The deed of mass murder was evil, but the man himself was not necessarily so.” I am however by no means insinuating that “evil” (or what is miss labeled as such) was not present in both the movie theater and in the Sikh temple, yet after reading Weldon’s views on the way in which society justifies mass killings in the time of war and at the same time calling these spree shooters evil. By using this term, we are insinuating that such actions were brought on not by the current state of society, nor by a single mind and its inability to adapt to the greater consciousness of society, but by some larger destructive force that is believed to exist outside of our own understanding. It is fare to say that such supernatural “evil” existence has yet to be proven. One could go so far to acclaim the random killings carried out by a singular person and his fantasies of violence and his attempt to replicate a Hollywood production were not of evil but the actions of one that lost touch with reality. It could also be said, that both the soldier and the skinhead has most often found justification for their killings, not from some evil supernatural dark force, but by the reality in which one creates in his own mind. This brings us back to our original question. What distinguishes something as evil or insane?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/7806005/Fay-Weldon-mass-murderers-are-insane-but-not-evil.html

Science daily about ADHD
F.D.A. Finds Short Supply of Attention Deficit Drugs

Recently, the arguments were instigated that schools led children with distracted or hyperactivities, which are just the simple child characteristics but not ADHD, as placing a stigma of ADHD patients, and extended to drug treatment. First of all, appropriate diagnosis is necessary for the distracted children. If the relevant child is suspected as ADHD, the suitable measures should be prepared through the accurate diagnosis. Because these children are distracted, leading them to the medication is just a way to destroy the future of the children. The distracted children at school frequently have many cases to get scolded or reprimanded from teachers, which consequently may lead them to lose confidence and fall into the state of despair that they think themselves as incompetent or stupid. Therefore, the children treated as the ‘outcast’ would frequently appear as their studying ability drops and would have non-amicable personal relationships. The reason of the presence of teachers is to lead the future of children to the right way. In other words, if accurate measures of teachers towards children do not form, the young children will continuously follow the wrong way. According to recent ScienceDaily, the study that resulted ADHD is caused by the delayed development of brain. However, the drug treatments are not an exact answer. It is figurative from FDA that even an insufficient drug supplement is appeared due to abuse of ADHD drug treatment. The university students take ADHD medications during exam periods or when have much stress to higher their concentration. Despite of the warning of FDA, it is very pitiable reality that the overdoses of drugs, and hundreds of students, including children without accurate diagnosis, take dangerous medications with inappropriate reasons. Of course, it is necessary to have accurate diagnosis on children and this would be appropriate to approach in various ways instead of only relying on drugs, although the diagnosis result is shown as ADHD.

Medicalization of deviance refers to the growing trend of categorizing deviance as medical conditions. This means that socially deviant behaviors are opted to treated by a medical professional through the administering of drugs rather than socially-interactive outlets that seek to adjust the behavior.

This article points out a study which shows the longer-lasting effect that cognitive therapy, a type of psychotherapy, has over antidepressants in treating depression. The study “challenges the American Psychiatric Association’s guidelines that antidepressant medications are the only effective treatment for moderately to severely depressed patients.” The greater success of cognitive therapy as a treatment for depression should cause us to look into de-medicalizing depression; because if the treatment is non-medical, isn’t grounds for the cause being non-medical as well?

But towards the end, the article also points out that a patient’s reception of and response to treatment is key. This, to my mind, may signal that once something has been medicalized, it may always remain that way in the minds of some of those people who are exhibiting the deviant behavior. I wonder whether it would make a difference if the institution which labeled the deviance was the State only (through its laws). It may be the case that people respond differently to their case of deviance based upon which social institution labels it as deviant. Maybe because these people believe that other sicknesses or disorders of the body are very much tangible, and that anything given a similar medical label deserves that label, and therefore, needs a very tangible bio-chemical cure to be administered.

Psychiatrist arrested for issuing illegal prescriptions

After watching “Medicated Child” i started to wonder why would anyone willing over medicate such an innocent person, giving families the false perception that something is wrong with their loved ones and false hope that it will be better. When in reality all you are doing is creating the problem to begin with. To me the answer seemed clear…money, but i didnt want to believe someone can be so selfish. Unfortunately it is true. Seen in this article  an 84 year old psychiatrist was prescribing an extremely high amount of Oxycodone which is a drug commonly used to get high. This shows why in the documentary “The medicated child” the doctors were so quick to prescribe the children more and more money because instead of finding the best alternative they just want to make money. One thing that disturbed me the most was in this article it says that undercover agents were able to go in to her office talk for about 10 minutes and leave with a prescription of 90 pills of oxycodone when in fact there was nothing wrong at all. The article also says that she made a daily total of two to three thousand dollars and had over three million dollars in various bank accounts all from illegally prescribing drugs. This shows that you dont need to fit the typical  criminal stereotype to be a criminal. Even the ones we trust to keep us safe can turn out to be criminals for the right price.