Our Culture Makes the Mentally Ill Into Cult Heroes

Friday - October 02, 2015

RUSH: Reason magazine, Brian Doherty:  Obama Talks Earnestly of Simple Laws that Could Have Prevented Oregon Shooting," but he didn't name any.  What simple law could stop this?  Look, folks, this is crucial.  I don't mind being redundant.  Just pummel people with this.  The dream of gun control exists.  It existed on the campus, this college in Oregon.  It exists in every school campus in this country practically.  Every one of them is a gun-free zone.  Every one of them is the utopia the left wants.  Every damned one of them.  There aren't any guns in the hands of good people.  And yet guns still end up there. 

Obama says we've got to stop this.  Nobody can tell us how to do this.  Unless you just eliminate guns, and even if you tried that, even if there were a new law that said the only people in America who could legally own guns were law enforcement, federal, state, local, Secret Service, things like, do you think that would end the practice of guns being in the hands of criminals?  They don't have a solution for this.  The advocates of gun control do not have a solution, folks. 

If you are a well-intentioned big-hearted person and this kind of thing rips your heart out and makes you sad and makes you cry and you're longing for a solution to where this kind of thing doesn't happen anymore, let me just tell you that the people on the Democrat side, left side of this country with their ideas, will not solve this.  They do not have a solution.  We've had a blueprint.  We've got a testing ground, if you will, on every school campus in the.  Why are there school shootings, anyway?  Why are there school shootings and not other places?  Because everybody knows there are no guns allowed there.  And there are kids there.  Security people don't even have guns.  It all makes sense. 

The bottom line is you cannot fix this with gun control.  You would think that would have been learned by now.  And I maintain to you even if people like Obama and every other elected Democrat, Hillary Clinton, know that you cannot solve this with gun control, it will not stop them from pushing for it.  The roots of this can be found in two places:  cultural rot -- which has led to a lack of respect for the sanctity of life itself and for people -- and, the second thing is, a culture that is making mentally ill people into cult heroes through media and social media. 

Oh, I know.  The Oregon shooter was not even a student at the school.  He went there for this very purpose.  He went there to kill Christians. 

You want to stop these kind of things?  We've gotta clean up the soul of our nation.  We have to stop making cult heroes out of mentally ill people.  And we have got to somehow reverse this lack of respect and sanctity for life itself.  This story doesn't have anything to do with the incident per se, but it does have to do with something I just mentioned.  I read the most incredible story in the New York Post.  I read it, I read the headline, "Well, this has gotta be an intriguing story." 

The headline of the story is:  "I Poured Drain Cleaner In My Eyes to Blind Myself."  You will not believe this story.  This is a story supporting what this woman did.  "I Poured Drain Cleaner In My Eyes to Blind Myself -- For most people, going blind is their worst nightmare, but for this North Carolina woman it was a dream come true." All right, that's kind of perverted there, folks.  I mean, we know we're off the rails here just in that opening sentence.  "For most people going blend is their worst nightmare, but for this North Carolina woman it was a dream come true."  I'm not gonna mention her name.  The newspaper story does, but I'm not, 'cause I don't want people to get misdirected on this.  But the woman is 30 years old. 

She was "so desperate to be blind that she poured draining cleaner in her baby blues to wipe out her eyesight -- and she couldn’t be happier."  Wait, wait, wait, now.  It gets better.  This woman, 30 years old, "suffers from an illness called body integrity identity disorder (BIID) -- a disease that causes able-bodied people to strongly desire a disability. 'I really feel this is the way I was supposed to be born, that I should have been blind from birth.' The afflicted woman knew from a young age she wanted to be blind, and would attempt to harm her eyesight by staring at the sun while 'blind-simming,' or pretending to be blind."  By the way, this story can be found in the everyday news pages of the New York Post, not in the oddball, weirdo, you won't believe it section. 

"By the time Shuping turned 21, the idea of being blind was 'a non-stop alarm that was going off' and she sought the help of a sympathetic psychologist to help her carry out her ultimate desire in 2006. The psychologist gave her eye-numbing drops before sprinkling a few droplets of drain cleaner into each pupil. 'It hurt, let me tell you. My eyes were screaming and I had some drain cleaner going down my cheek burning my skin,' she said. 'But all I could think was, "I am going blind, it is going to be okay."  Dr. Michael First, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, says that people who suffer from BIID can’t control their need to be disabled."

I never heard of this until I read this story today.  I've certainly never met anybody that had it.  The Columbia University psychiatry professor: "These people are aware that this feeling of theirs is unusual -- they know it is coming from within them. They can’t explain it." This woman is "now studying for a degree in education and is hoping to help other blind people live an independent life. She hopes that by sharing her story, it will encourage other sufferers of BIID to seek professional help."

Okay, so a standard news story in an everyday American newspaper with wide readership, New York Post, blind integrity identity disorder, and the woman is portrayed here as finally realizing her dream.  But now everybody knows her story.  She has also achieved great fame or -- well, she's on the way.  This will do it.  And she's going to have lots of media attention, and they'll be asking her about it, and she will have all kinds of answers about her blin, body integrity identity disorder, and a whole lot of really confused and unstable Americans all over the country are gonna see this, and they're going to react to it, some of them in way that, "Hey, man, you know what?  Everybody knows who she is, it's a way to get fame."

And this could trigger in a whole lot of people a sudden, "Yeah, you know what?  I know I'm unhappy.  Now I know why.  I'm supposed to be disabled."  And who knows what some people might start doing in order to make themselves disabled now.  Because this portrayed as absolutely normal, and she even had the assistance of a Columbia University psychiatry professor and a medical door who actually participated in pouring Drano in her eyes to make her go blind in order realize a life ambition.  That's sick.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  Yeah, it was just a few weeks ago we had a story about a guy cut off an arm or something, another example of "body identity integrity disorder."  He knew that he wasn't supposed to have both arms or both legs or something.  Look, there are mental disorders all over the world.  There are people that are mentally ill and so forth, and we're not treating them properly.  We're making cult heroes out of some of them.  We're making them, in other cases, cultural leaders in the sense that they are really in touch with themselves. 

And it's truly dangerous.  

That, as much as guns, is an explanation for what's going on.  These are sick people.  And yet we're treating them as though they're rational and we want to apply rationally made laws to irrational people.  And then we end up blaming the law or the lack of it.  And it's because of political correctness that we cannot honestly talk about mental illness and deal with it.  Half of the homeless are mentally ill. They should not be on the street. They should be institutionalized.

But somebody came along some time ago and said, "Yeah, it's a violation of their human and political rights," and plus, they're a great political weapon.  It's a great way to blame Republicans for not caring about people.  You never hear about the homeless during Democrat administrations, other than that one story from LA last couple of weeks which still puzzles me how that happened, but nevertheless it did.  

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  Open Line Friday, Colorado Springs is next.  This is Carol.  It's great to have you on the program.  Hello.

CALLER:  I have two points.  I want to say how much we really love you, and I have a gift for you. You're so generous and you always give things to other people, so I want to make sure that I can get that through somehow. If I can just have an e-mail or something after this to know how to send something, it's actually a painting.  I'm an artist, and it's a painting that you inspired.

RUSH:  Wow. Well, when we're finished here, hang on --

CALLER:  Yeah.

RUSH: -- and Mr. Snerdley will pick up the phone, and if we have such an address, he will give it to you.

CALLER:  Okay.  Well, I want you to see it, like I said -- I'll tell you what it is real quick.  It's a giant rooster crying, you know, screaming, and the body, part of it has the United States in it, and it's just symbolic of who you are and what you do.  And I think you'll like it.

RUSH:  Thank you.

CALLER:  I'm not a bad artist.

RUSH:  Trying to wake everybody up, huh, that's the point?

CALLER:  Correct.  It's called Wake Up America.

RUSH:  Right.  I knew that when you said a rooster was in it.

CALLER:  Yes.  It's pretty symbolic, but I think you'll like it.

RUSH:  Thank you.  Thank you much.

CALLER:  And the point, you've talked about a lot of things, but a while back you were talking about this woman that wanted herself to be disabled, and, you know, obviously, those who can think straight, you know, like most people, this is a horrible choice. And most people that are disabled would give anything not to be disabled, to be able-bodied.  My husband and I actually own a business here in Colorado Springs that helps people live in their homes so that if they're disabled they can get around, get in and out, that sort of thing. We have some lifts and ramps and that. I'm so concerned that we have let personal choice go completely crazy where it's just okay, no matter what somebody decides --

RUSH:  Well, but, see, I would stop you.  I know it looks like we're letting personal choice go crazy, but we're really not.  We're letting certain people engage in personal choice, seemingly without limit.  And it is the kind of people who are being extended this opportunity that is curious.  What she's talking about here, folks, there's a woman, it's in the New York Post today, woman who claims to have an illness called body integrity identity disorder, and she claims that she has known from the moment of her birth that she should have been blind.  She's incomplete because she can see. 

She went to a psychiatrist at Columbia University who assisted her in pouring Drano in her eyes, blinding her, thereby making her whole.  The story in the New York Post today celebrates this, and that's what's wrong.  We obviously have a very sorrowful mental disorder here that has been aided and assisted by somebody at Columbia University. They've even given this so-called disorder or disease a name, body integrity identity disorder.  But you can look throughout our society, and we are celebrating this kind of mutilation in the human body in any number of ways, and we're making cult heroes out of these people, and we are applauding their courage and their ability and willingness to openly know who they really are and to be unafraid of it.  And we are not helping them, and we're not helping anybody else in this process, either. 

There's another name for this desire to be disabled.  It's called transableism.  I kid you not.  And we're in the process of mainstreaming this.  And why are we in the process of mainstreaming this?  Because you don't have the right to decide whether somebody is off kilter, it's not up to you.  You're bigoted, you're prejudiced and you're biased if you think somebody is mentally disabled.  There is no mental disability.  There are only people's desires and their deeply held ability to get in touch with themselves.  So all this stuff gets mainstreamed and normalized, people get famous as a result of it, which creates copycats.  Look, folks, there's a reason that all of this is happening.  And in every instance it starts with an L, the word starts with an L.  I'm sorry.