Biology: The only cause of Mental Illness?

Biology: The Only Cause of Mental Illness

By Christine Johnson

The Ford family did not know what on earth could be wrong with their teenaged son Greg. He seemed to have every advantage – a loving home, a stay-at-home-mom, a close knit church-going family, and a responsible father who put his family first. But things were not good with Greg – not by a long shot. In fact, they were really very bad.

Greg was clearly engulfed with rage and sought to show it to the world every single day. He was uncontrollable and physically fought with his father, refused to take any discipline, and did whatever he wanted. The young man had tried to commit suicide twice, been heavily involved with drugs and alcohol, and drifted in and out of psychiatric hospitals and youth treatment centers, all before he had turned nineteen.

Normally a psychiatrist would diagnose Greg with an alphabet soup of illnesses. Perhaps he had Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD), or maybe he had ADD or OCD or was bipolar (I or II). Maybe he needed medication to straighten out a chemical imbalance, or stimulate his serotonin, or perhaps to inhibit it. Either way, according to medicine today, there would definitely something physically wrong with him.

But then the dark truth finally came out:

“… [O]n Jan. 31, Paula and Rodney Ford read the Globe story detailing [Catholic Priest] Shanley’s long history of abuse. When they showed the story to Greg, ”He looked at me, dropped to his knees and broke down,” Rodney Ford said.

Greg told his parents that his CCD teachers sometimes sent him to see Shanley in the rectory when he misbehaved. He said that is how the abuse began.

”He would play card games, and if you lost you would have to do something to him,” Greg recalled. ”I always lost, so he’d make you take your pants off. Then your underwear. … Then he’d make you do stuff like bend over.”

The ”games” led to sex, he said, followed by warnings to keep it secret. ”He’d say, `If you ever tell anyone, they won’t believe you,”’ Greg said. ”He said something would happen to my parents.’ ” (Boston Globe B1 2/13/2002)

No OCD. No ODD. No chemical imbalance. No biological causes for Greg Ford’s problems. He was sexually molested from age six to eleven, the oldest reason for emotional acting-out in the world. Of course, these types of emotional causes for mental illness are pooh-poohed by today’s medicine and it’s a (another) terrible medical mistake.

Thank goodness that this boy’s real problem was discovered before he was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital, or given court ordered ECT (shock) treatments, or forced by his local county mental health program to take medication or face commitment. These things happen every day, right here in the United States of America. It’s time for a change in our approach to mental problems.

By the way, there was a whistleblower during the time period when Greg and at least one other boy were being molested. This is what was said of her in the same article:

‘It wasn’t the kind of situation where a lot of people suspected anything, except Jackie,” said Kathryn D’Agostino, a former St. John’s parishioner and family friend of the Fords. ”I have to say that she was right. … She had an incredible hatred of him [Priest Shanley], and she said he was a child molester. I didn’t believe her. I didn’t think she was lying, but I thought she was deluded. From what I knew of this guy, I thought it was impossible. But nobody’s denying it now.’ ”

So before the priest sexual abuse scandal broke, the secretary who suspected Shanley was considered deluded, and the boy victimized by Shanley considered mad, but the child moslesting priest (who had been involved in the foundation of NAMBLA – a group that advocates sex between adults and children) was considered a respectable, rational church leader.

Makes you think, doesn’t it?