I too know Dick Cheney. And I know something about the effects of physical illness on mental functioning. In my younger days, writing in the Archives of General Psychiatry, I identified a psychiatric syndrome ("Secondary Mania," the title of the paper) that was associated entirely with organic (i.e. underlying physical) disorders. The British medical journal Lancet found this discovery notable enough to devote an editorial to it shortly afterward and to alert clinicians to look for its presenting symptoms.
And as a former chief resident of the psychiatric consultation service of the Massachusetts General Hospital -- my house staff was called in to diagnose and treat medical in-patients (many of them post-op, many with cardiac disease) who had developed psychiatric symptoms -- I know something about organically caused dementias. And I know pseudoscientific rubbish when I see it.
I was at first inclined to pass off Cottle's piece as a weird put-on -- when people become particularly deranged about this administration, it's hard to tell -- but her earnest and lengthy piling on of medical research about dementia and cardiovascular disease suggests that she is quite serious.
And supremely silly. Such silliness has a pedigree, mind you. It is in the great tradition of the 1964 poll of psychiatrists that found Barry Goldwater clinically paranoid. Goldwater having become over the years the liberals' favorite conservative (because of his libertarianism), nary a word is heard today about him being mentally ill or about that shameful election-year misuse of medical authority by the psychiatrists who answered the poll. The disease they saw in Goldwater was, in fact, deviation from liberalism, which remains today so incomprehensible to some that it must be explained by resort to arterial plaques and cardiac ejection fractions.
If there's a diagnosis to be made here, it is this: yet another case of the one other syndrome I have been credited with identifying, a condition that addles the brain of otherwise normal journalists and can strike without warning -- Bush Derangement Syndrome, Cheney Variant. |