APRIL 8, 2018 |
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Hour 1 |
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Hour 2 |
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"We must
IDENTIFY and TREAT SOCIOPATHS at EARLIER AGES |
to FEND OFF VIOLENCE" |
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Today's guest:
Dr. Richard Malotky, MD |
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Dr. Malotky graduated from the
University of Minnesota Medical School at Minneapolis in 1982. He
works in Redding, CA and specializes in Family Medicine. He is often
a Sunday community columnist in the Redding Record Searchlight
newspaper. |
RichardMalotkymd.com |
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Editor's note: After
a hiatus, local physician Richard Malotky will be returning to our
rotation of Sunday community columnists. He wrote this column after
the Sandy Hook shootings, and after this week's killings in Florida,
found it still appropriate and necessary to be shared.
You can add it to the list of things I don't understand. Why is it
that we can't seem to have a healthy discussion about mental illness
in this country?
Every time somebody does something completely crazy, we hear about
how sad it is and how we need to get rid of guns or knives or
baseball bats or whatever the mentally ill person used to hurt a
bunch of people. But nobody ever talks about what's really wrong.
Lets get something straight. A "normal" person can't go into a
primary school with an semi-automatic rifle and kill first-graders
like they are cockroaches. All of these killers share the same
mental illness — they have anti-social personality disorder,
sometimes also known as sociopathic personality disorder.
People in the know estimate that about one in 1,000 folks suffers
from it. Of course, the great majority never act on their twisted
thoughts, but every now and then everything lines up and the results
are a disaster.
It turns out that personality is influenced by a great many factors
in human growth and development. Some of these factors are genetic
and some of them are environmental. As you might imagine,
personality disorders occur when this development goes wrong.
There are lots of types of personality disorders. Many of them you
have heard of before, such as bipolar and obsessive compulsive. But
the sociopath is in a special place because of the damage they can
do.
Sociopaths share quite a few traits. Most of them are quite bright
intellectually. All of them are narcissists. They lack empathy and
the ability to feel how others are feeling. These are the kids who
torture the neighbor cat before they go through puberty.
Their family fears them. They have no friends, unless it's another
sociopath — think Columbine killers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris.
They are often misdiagnosed as having other mental illnesses, but
they refuse treatment and won't take medication. They are
pathological liars and often have a police record. They never learn
anything from their mistakes and they have no regrets. They like to
abuse drugs and alcohol.
What can we do, as a society and culture, to prevent these very sick
individuals from shooting up our schools, movie theaters and other
gathering places?
The answer is to identify them and treat them before they go through
puberty. It's possible, but it would take leadership and will and
nationwide testing.
These folks can be found with personality tests. A protocol needs to
be developed to test probably two or three different times — let's
say age 8, 10 and 12. Early identification might also help us start
behavioral treatments that might prevent this disorder from blooming
into the awful flower these folks can become.
We could also use our modern imaging techniques. When sociopaths
have a MRI, the part of the brain in charge of empathy and fear, the
amygdala, is much smaller than in a person without the disorder. And
the genetic analysis game may have a great future to help us
identify these patients early and treat them with something other
than the heavy duty medications that they hate and won't take.
It would also help if our culture and judicial system would actually
trust the psychiatrist or mental health professional when one of
these folks is identified.
If we are really serious about preventing these senseless acts of
violence, we have to accept that the mentally ill are among us and
that they are identifiable and treatable. Only then can we reduce
the frequency and severity of these horrendous acts.
Dr. Richard Malotky can be reached at
rmalotky@hotmail.com . |
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Malotky: Kids
shouldn't hide from other points of view |
Richard Malotky
Published
11:29 a.m. PT Dec. 15, 2016 |
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I'm
happy our kids are done with college. Modern parents, not content to
spend $50,000 or $60,000 per year on tuition, now are saddled with
the cost of a year's supply of Depends diapers and all those
pacifiers. Say what you want, that all adds up!
Sometimes I like to think about the term micro-aggression. Micro, as
we all know, is the prefix that means one-thousandths of something.
A micrometer, for instance, is a ruler that measures one-thousandth
of an inch. So now you have to tell me: how did we raise a
generation that is threatened by one-thousandths of an aggression?
How did that happen?
I'm old now, and I grew up in a different time. When I skinned my
knee sliding into second in Little League, thank goodness my parents
didn't insist I be taken out of the game! Truth be told, I got on
base so rarely that St. Peter himself couldn't have pried me off
second.
In seventh grade, I couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time. I
had more zits than anyone in Minnesota and Wisconsin combined, and I
guess I got teased a little more than most. So what? Who cares?
Didn't kill me. Made me stronger.
Modern universities love to pride themselves on diversity. And I'm
all for it. We have every skin and hair color represented, every
sexual orientation, every religion and creed, and people from all
parts of the globe. But modern universities are very hostile to one
important form of diversity. Diversity of thought.
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