A First-Rate Madness (48 page)

254
as historian Martin Kitchen describes well:
Martin Kitchen,
The Third Reich: Charisma and Community
(London: Pearson Longman, 2008). Martin Kitchen, “Hitler Bewitcher or Hitler Bewitched?” in
Creativity and Madness: An Interdisciplinary Symposium,
ed. J. D. Keehn, 93–108 (York, ON: University Press of Canada, 1987).

254
No Hitler, no Holocaust:
Ron Rosenbaum,
Explaining Hitler
(New York: Random House, 1998), 348.

256
a deep cultural stigma accompanying mental illness:
Paul Jay Fink and Allen Tasman, eds.,
Stigma and Mental Illness
(Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, 1992).

256
physicians attach as much stigma:
William R. Dubin and Paul Jay Fink, “Effects of Stigma on Psychiatric Treatment,” in Fink and Tasman, eds.,
Stigma and Mental Illness
.

256
Even mental health professionals:
David Kingdon, Tonmoy Sharma, and Deborah Hart, “What Attitudes Do Psychiatrists Hold Towards People with Mental Illness?”
Psychiatric Bulletin
29 (2004): 401–406.

257
a “proud mediocrity”:
Cesare Lombroso,
The Man of Genius
(New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1891), 2.

257
a “prejudice” of psychiatric “inferiority”:
Ernst Kretschmer,
The Psychology of Men of Genius
(London: Kegan Paul; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1931), 6.

257
“It shows Winston in a completely false light”:
Lord David Owen, “Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt: Did Their Health Problems Impair Their Effectiveness as World Leaders?” Churchill Lecture Series, Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms, May 5, 2009, written transcript, 36.

257
the Kennedy family criticized Nigel Hamilton's . . . evidence:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nigel-hamilton/the-kennedys_b_810465.html
(accessed February 27, 2011).

257
Brendan Maher showed:
Brendan Maher, “Delusional Thinking and Cognitive Disorder,”
Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science
40 (2005): 136–146.

258
mental heuristics and biases:
Stuart Sutherland,
Irrationality
(London: Pinter and Martin, 2007).

258
identified thirty-one standard irrational thought processes:
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/works/heuristicsandbiases.htm
(accessed February 27, 2011).

258
the unfortunate Missouri senator Thomas Eagleton:
http://chipur.com/i-want-relief/thomas-eagleton-heartbeat-depressed-president/
(accessed February 27, 2011).

259
“[Adviser David Axelrod] said to me”:
Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson,
The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election
(New York: Penguin, 2009), 18.

260
“Character above all”:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/character/
(accessed February 27, 2011).

260
“And so, when I put my hand on the Bible”:
http://www.4president.org/speeches/bushcheney2000convention.htm
(accessed February 27, 2011).

260
“With Bush, there was an instant change”:
http://old.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/kessler200408090855.asp
(accessed February 27, 2011).

261
“Nobody died when Clinton lied”:
http://www.nobodydied.com/
(accessed February 27, 2011).

261
“Public virtue cannot exist”:
John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren,
Warren-Adams Letters
(Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1917), 22.

261
“It's my experience”:
Abraham Lincoln, Marion Mills Miller, and Henry Clay Whitney,
Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Presidential Addresses, 1859–1865
(New York: Current Literature Publishing Company, 1907), 282.

264
“to form what, for lack of a better phrase”:
Matthew Joseph Bruccoli and Scottie Fitzgerald Smith,
Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 443.

266
the classic work of the psychologist Hans Eysenck:
Hans Eysenck,
The Psychology of Politics
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954).

266–267
Simonton . . . Westen . . . Lakoff:
Dean Keith Simonton,
Psychology, Science, and History: An Introduction to Historiometry
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). Drew Westen,
The Political Brain
(New York: Public Affairs, 2007). George Lakoff,
The Political Mind
(New York: Viking, 2008).

267
Michael Fellman in his biography of Sherman:
Michael Fellman,
Citizen Sherman: A Biography of William Tecumseh Sherman
(New York: Random House, 1995).

267
Joshua Shenk in his biography of Lincoln:
Joshua Wolf Shenk,
Lincoln's Melancholy
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

267
does not mean that illness is
nothing but
a social construction:
S. Nassir Ghaemi,
The Rise and Fall of the Biopsychosocial Model: Reconciling Art and Science in Psychiatry
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

268
the claims of some postmodernist historians notwithstanding:
For some of my debates with postmodernist oriented colleagues, see
http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=4504
,
http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=4440
, and
alien.dowling.edu/~cperring/aapp/bulletin_v_17_2/21.doc
(accessed February 27, 2011).

269
“split-brain” research:
Michael Gazzaniga,
Mind Matters: How Mind and Brain Interact to Create Our Conscious Lives
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988). In some epilepsies, where seizures do not respond well to medications, as a last resort a kind of surgery is sometimes used where the fibers, called the corpus callosum, connecting the right and left hemisphere are cut. After corpus callectomy, seizures that begin on one side of the brain at least do not travel to the other side, and full-blown convulsions are thus prevented. This kind of surgery began a few decades ago, and in the intervening time researchers have observed an important thing about these patients: living with two halves of a brain no longer communicating with each other, they seem to have two brains, not one. Not much is noticeable in terms of personality or behavior; interacting on the street or in stores, one cannot tell someone with a split brain, after corpus callectomy, apart from the rest of us. With neuropsychological tests, however, important abnormalities emerge.

The right hemisphere of the brain controls the left visual field; the left hemisphere controls the right visual field. In all right-handed persons, language is fully controlled by the left hemisphere. (In left-handed persons, language is partly controlled by both hemispheres.) Thus in right-handed patients after split-brain surgery, the split between language and vision can be tested. If an image is shown to the right hemisphere (in the left visual field) of, say, a woman talking on a phone, the experimenter who asks the patient—What do you see?—will get an answer, a wrong answer, but an answer nonetheless. “I see a friend,” the subject might say. “What is the friend doing?” “Cooking dinner.” Then with a phone nearby, the experimenter can ask the subject, “Show me what you saw.” The subject will pick up the phone.

The split-brain epilepsy patient “knows” what is seen by the right hemisphere, but she cannot speak it. What is most interesting is that she does not say, “I do not know,” or “I am unsure,” or some such. Even when prompted before the experiment by the researcher saying, “Now remember, you have had split-brain surgery for your seizures, keep that in mind when you answer my questions,” patients rarely say that they do not know what they saw, or why they feel as they do about what they saw. They never admit ignorance; they always make something up. That is the way our brains operate: our brains are
rationalizing machines;
we are designed, by God or evolution, to come up with plausible explanations for what we experience. We
never
say we do not know.

269
Stephen Ambrose writes:
Stephen Ambrose, “William T. Sherman: A Reappraisal,”
American History Illustrated
1 (1967): 6–7.

269
decades of excellent twin studies:
Kenneth Kendler and Carol Prescott,
Genes, Environment and Psychopathology
(New York: Guilford, 2006).

270
David Hume starkly laid out this “problem of causation”:
David Hume,
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

271
The German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey:
Rudolf Makkreel,
Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). S. Nassir Ghaemi,
The Rise and Fall of the Biopsychosocial Model
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

272
“Whilst thus many men of genius themselves”:
Ernst Kretschmer,
The Psychology of Men of Genius
(London: Kegan Paul; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.), 4.

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