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APRIL 8, 2018

WE THE PEOPLE RADIO

WE THE PEOPLE RADIO

Hour 1   WE THE PEOPLE RADIO Hour 2   WE THE PEOPLE RADIO

"We must IDENTIFY and TREAT SOCIOPATHS at EARLIER AGES

to FEND OFF VIOLENCE"

 
Today's  guest:            Dr. Richard Malotky, MD

 

 

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

 

 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 .

 
Malotky: Kids shouldn't hide from other points of view
Richard Malotky      Published 11:29 a.m. PT Dec. 15, 2016

 

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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WE THE PEOPLE RADIO

Trying to find some explanation, I have to go back to how we raise our kids. Do we really want them to be this fragile? We raised two, and of course we didn't want our kids to suffer too much trauma. But they can learn a lot by being on a losing team. They learned a lot by finding out that blowing off a test means you get a poor grade on the test. After age 12, only the winning team should get a trophy.


Waiting for all this to improve, there is a light in the darkness. The University of Chicago. The students accepted to this school are informed before enrolling that there will be no censorship of thought during their four years at this school. They can expect to hear ideas they may find objectionable. And they will be expected to deal with it.

If our kids ever quit holding out on us and give us some grandchildren, they could do themselves solid by going to the University of Chicago. Challenging thoughts and ideas should be the goal of higher education, not the enemy.

Richard Malotky can be reached at rmalotky@hotmail.com .
 

 Bumper Music for today's show:

ALL of the links below are set to the starting point of the song in YouTube

12:15 Break:  start playing as we sign off  https://youtu.be/gzbI_dreFkA?t=40s  stop at 1:14  Carly Simon “Them”

12:17pm        https://youtu.be/0sw54Pdh_m8?t=56s stop at 1:16 Fine Young Cannibals "She Drives Me Crazy"

12:30pm     https://youtu.be/RMR5zf1J1Hs  stop at  1:33 Ozzie Ozborn "Crazy Train"

12:32pm        https://youtu.be/bjSpO2B6G4s stop at :43 Buffalo Springfield "Stop Children What's that Sound?"

12:45pm     https://youtu.be/X9bOsdHckhg stop at 1:03 George Thorogood "Bad to the Bone"

12:47pm          https://youtu.be/u1ZvPSpLxCg  stop at 1:14 Tears for Fears "Mad World"

1:00pm  Play under our sign off for the final 45 seconds of the hour https://youtu.be/R1h4Vl6oTyA  Ferris Bueller “Oh Yeah”

1:15pm   start playing  under us as we sign off  https://youtu.be/PdjA3iKYjk0?t=1m26s stop at 2:30  Toby Keith - “Beer for My Horses

1:17pm         https://youtu.be/BfuWXRZe9yA stop at 1:03  The Who "Behind Blue Eyes"

1:30pm        https://youtu.be/O52jAYa4Pm8?t=42s stop at 1:33 Talking Heads "Psycho Killer"

1:32pm        https://youtu.be/rn8p1Hrc7yI  play full clip (23 seconds)  The Who "There's a Doctor"

1:45pm      https://youtu.be/fJ9rUzIMcZQ?t=56s stop at 1:54  Queen "Bohemian Rhapsody"

1:47pm      https://youtu.be/iisYw0epV_Q  stop at 1:06 Joni Mitchell "Twisted"   

2:00pm Start playing this under us with 40 seconds remaining as we sign off  https://youtu.be/w8KQmps-Sog