Moral Correctness and Mental Clarity

by Esther Israel

The snippets below were written by yours truly in March 2025 after I showed the quotes from Madness in the Mental Health Profession to a psychiatrist colleague. He recommended a book by a British psychiatrist who documented his experiences treating patients in a psychiatric hospital. Dr. Dalrymple's interactions with patients over two decades ago are very similar to my experiences across the pond. As I was reading his incisive and funny book, I made note of the statements and interactions that apply to my professional experiences. I reworded Dalrymple's ideas with ideas introduced to me from Gad Saad in his 2021 book, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas are Killing Common Sense, his interviews and X postings. Read, think, act in alignment with common sense.

References:

Dalrymple, T. (2001). Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass. Ivan R. Dee, Chicago.

Saad, G. (2021). The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas are Killing Common Sense. Regnery Publishing, a division of Salem Media Group.

There is an absence of virtue in our virtue signaling age. Society openly devalues spirituality, morality and culture that is our own. From this squalid standpoint, it is no wonder that many fail to see their physical and mental health problems stemming from lack of: inhibition, foresight, self-assessment and the ability to see oneself as others see them.

In a society that teaches us to attend to an external locus of control, advocating personal responsibility might be construed as criticism of others.

Symbiotic relationships:

Premise 1) Society loves victims and will keep them sympathetic and defended so long as the victim maintains a downtrodden status with no hints of self-reliance.

Premise 2) Academics and mental health professionals bemoan the difficulties of working with victim populations more than they do providing interventions and teaching people how to empower themselves.

Conclusion: Misery loves company. Misery begets funding to research failures in the treatment of misery.

Government funded research hypothesis: Poor choices increase in proportion to treatments offered for the consequences of poor choices.

There is more attention given in the news and on social media to shaming political incorrectness than to examining the practicality of unpopular policies.

Gluttony is a deadly sin. A lifestyle of overeating processed food is linked to chronic serious health conditions. In today’s day and age, a medical professional that offers advice and instruction on nutritional health and weight loss, might be considered to be body shaming.

Scientific facts do not make judgments about beliefs, people and their choices. We do. Our physical health is mediated by our choices.

People are more insistent on their rights than on their duties.

A taste for fast food and the lifestyle that goes with it feeds a way of being with little planning, flexibility, effort and commitment. Loss of dignity, pursuit of instant gratification, spiritual and emotional emptiness and ignorance on how to nourish oneself are symptoms of soul starvation. This is the mind-body disconnection.

Granting security in exchange for the status quo is an invitation to irresponsibility. This happens with academic tenure, government appointment and health insurance. In this social justice system, citizens assent without consent. It is unwise to judge whether or not the individual takes responsibility. There remains a dialectical relationship between cause and effect.

In treatment settings, the therapist's duty to warn / duty to protect is often seen as betrayal by the party that was reported. Mandatory reporting has no bearing on the duty of the government agency that was informed to provide treatment and prevent therapy interfering behaviors to the patient that made their disclosures in what they thought was a confidential treatment setting.

Moral intelligence is applying your knowledge to work, personal life and leisure. Moral intelligence knows that boredom comes from taking the path of least resistance, assuming that all paths are equal, waiting for someone to assign you purpose, the stifling of discernment and a lack common decency.

A lack of common sense in society at large comes not only from collective ignorance and stupidity but also from bad ideas and fear of accusations of wrongdoing.

When mental health practitioners avoid suggesting to patients that they are responsible for their own suffering just as they are responsible for their own relief, codependency ensues.

Mental health treatment is an attempt to alleviate suffering by teaching people how to live, delay gratification, practice good judgment and faith. Mental health therapists do not subscribe to entertainment and pleasure as the main purposes. When a patient with anxiety and depression talks about the reasons for their feelings, the listener can ask questions that move them away from their self-inflicted suffering and ongoing deception. Mental health therapy is clear that certain ways of living, with lies and abuse, is contrary to mental health. Honesty and decency promote wellbeing.

Mental health therapists thwart efforts to avoid painful dilemmas and encourage responsibility for alleviating misery by making a choice. They encourage sensibility over sentiment and doing what is necessary over what is easy. The decision to endure some pain with courage, compassion and sound judgment, is the way out of the dilemma.

The thinking error of generalizing from one to most confounds theory and practice and leads to the thinking errors of rationalization of intention and justification of behavior. It showcases to others a crooked way of being. Systemic solutions are sought when individual action is warranted.

Thinking errors beget bad ideas and the research to test these hypotheses. There will be those that interpret the findings with their thinking errors to justify further research rather than preventative action. Society continues to encourage complacency and denial. If the evidence mounts and the facts cannot be denied, the interpretation of the evidence is denied and twisted, the messenger is criticized and in hindsight, it is determined to be inevitable.

Delinquent adolescents today live in a world of impunity. Their parents and the police are unwilling to punish them, so they enter treatment. When there is clear infringement of the law while in treatment, the crimes are not often reported and there is no foresight into the escalating behaviors. Therapists motivated to protect the public from a dangerous person will be suppressed. Treatment programs make clear what value is placed on the safety of their patients and staff.

Suicidal empathy: 1) Wishing your allies well and your enemies misfortune, by agreeing with feelings born from dishonest reasons. 2) Indifference and willful ignorance around human conditions of violence, abuse, neglect, wanton cruelty and chaos while pretending to be compassionate, deliberately misleading others with faulty thinking, unrealistic optimism and silencing your critics. 3) Being taken by a mission and vision without considering the pros and cons and who gets to decide.

Does society harbor more people who get away with crimes or more people who are wrongfully incarcerated? A reliable and trustworthy law enforcement is a precondition for an effective criminal justice system.