Charles Krauthammer was trained as a psychiatrist. I often took issue with his foreign policy reading during the Bush administration. But his column on medicalizing mass murder really nails it. Just in case you missed it: a classic.
What a surprise – that someone who shouts “Allahu akbar” (the “God is great” jihadist battle cry) as he is shooting up a room of American soldiers might have Islamist motives. It certainly was a surprise to the mainstream media, which spent the weekend after the Fort Hood massacre downplaying Nidal Hasan’s religious beliefs.
“I cringe that he’s a Muslim… I think he’s probably just a nut case,” said Newsweek’s Evan Thomas. Some were more adamant. Time’s Joe Klein decried “odious attempts by Jewish extremists… to argue that the massacre perpetrated by Nidal Hasan was somehow a direct consequence of his Islamic beliefs.”
While none could match Klein’s peculiar cherchez-le-juifmotif, the popular story line was of an army psychiatrist driven over the edge by terrible stories he had heard from soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
They suffered. He listened. He snapped.
Really? What about the doctors and nurses, the counselors and physical therapists at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who every day hear and live with the pain and the suffering of returning soldiers? How many of them then picked up a gun and shot 51 innocents?
And what about civilian psychiatrists – not the Upper West Side therapist treating Woody Allen neurotics, but the thousands of doctors working with hospitalized psychotics – who every day hear not just tales but cries of the most excruciating anguish, of the most unimaginable torment? How many of those doctors commit mass murder?
IT’S BEEN decades since I practiced psychiatry. Perhaps I missed the epidemic.
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