Letters
Letters Spooked David Ignatius has been hanging around spooks too long. He makes some excellent suggestions for improving the operations of the bumbling Company ["Reinvent the CIA," April]. But...
...There, tuition is free to college students, paid for by the taxpayers...
...The mentally ill are getting drugs all right, but not the ones envisioned by the deinstitutionalizers...
...Perhaps tax breaks could be given to employers who create jobs not requiring college...
...However, only the best and brightest high school students are admitted after excelling in preparatory courses and passing stiff college entrance exams...
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...I hope the president will consider changes along these lines...
...These reforms would be fairer than today's system, which is best described as an increasingly transparent scam...
...Robert E. Gahringer Deering, NH Defining behavior like Larry Don McQuay's as mental illness has become the national solution for avoiding personal responsibility and self-determination...
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...But the nation would be better served, and the taxpayers would save roughly $30 billion annually, if we simply dismantled all non-electrical spy activities...
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...The truth emerges only from the unceasing exchange of facts and ideas in the marketplace—with input from scholars, journalists, diplomats, business and labor leaders, and others—and not from hiding isolated bits of information under classification stamps...
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...Finally, spy operations should go because secret institutions undermine democracy...
...Matt Clark New York, NY The writer is the former medicine editor of Newsweek...
...The president of the American Federation of Teachers said in an interview a few years ago that 95 percent of Americans attending college would not be admitted anywhere else in the world...
...Unfortunately, this concern is so deep and so general that it prevents a disinterested consideration of laws prescribing mandatory physical castration even for conclusively provable rape, and it dictates a preference for "chemical castration" that virtually eliminates the deterrent and communicative power of laws prescibing castration...
...Drewryville, VA Circumspection In their defense of castration as a device for preventing repeated acts of pederasty ["The Case for Castration," May] both Larry Don McQuay and Dr...
...Despite the spiraling tuition rates mentioned, college has long been too democratized—that is, too open to virtually anyone who wants to attend no matter what level of ability or preparedness...
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...McQuay wishes to be castrated, so be it...
...While I agree that deinstitutionalization has gone tragically awry, I think it inaccurate to lay most of the blame on poor Freud...
...Thus, he blames Freud's influence on the American psychiatry since the 1920s for "the social disaster we call deinstitutionalization...
...Fred S. Berlin ignore the deterrent functions of laws prescribing castration...
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...For everyone else, public schools would have to be made better so that a high school diploma means something once again (perhaps a vocational skill), and employers should be prohibited from requiring college degrees for jobs that have not traditionally required them...
...She left that firm several years ago and currently practices with another Washington firm, Mayer, Brown and Piatt...
...However, I fully agree with Torrey's assertion that the libertarian climate of the time—rooted in the sensational depiction of mental institutions as snake pits and whorehouses for people whose families don't want them—contributed hugely to the fiasco we now see acted out on the streets all over America...
...Unfortunately, the president is making the wrong reforms: He should be trying to make college more exclusive...
...As a medical journalist who covered this misguided development in the care of the mentally ill, I recall that the idea that patients in mental institutions could return to the community and lead relatively normal lives was solidly rooted in the development of psychoactive drugs such as the phenothiazines...
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...William M. Burke San Francisco, CA Nuts In his review of The Mad Among Us: A History of the Health Care of America's Mentally III by Gerald N. Grob [March], Dr...
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...For example, the truth about the emerging 1990 Iraqi crisis was widely available in the marketplace but was lost somewhere in the labyrinthine bureaucracy...
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...Grace A. Whitman Washington, DC Correction In a May article, Jon Meacham incorrectly stated that Amy Nathan practices law with Akin Gump...
...McQuay could satisfy the criteria for a DSM IIIR diagnostic category of pedophilia and/or sexual sadism, legitimizing his behavior as mental illnesss and thereby obliterating personal responsibility and obfuscating criminal intent...
...Indeed, information gets lost because policymakers never listen to their own analysts...
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...All of us bureaucratic veterans can cite many instances when policymakers dismissed advice with some version of, "If you were any good, you wouldn't be working here...
...If Mr...
...Of course, the number of overall places and the number taking each major would have to be sharply limited, though these numbers could be tailored to real needs, and other changes would obviously be necessary...
...And second, the recently released patients didn't come looking for their medication because they didn't think they needed it, which shouldn't have surprised anyone familiar with schizophrenia, the condition that affected most patients...
...And now, because of "diploma inflation," employers are often telling job applicants that they must have a four-year degree (cost $25,000+) to be able to get a dead-end, entry level job paying $6 per hour ($12,000 per year...
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...Such a system would by definition not discriminate against anybody regardless of background or income who was really ready for higher education...
...The dirty little secret is simply that there are far too many college degrees out there, driving down not only their value but also their holders' salaries...
...Degrees of Difficulty Jonathan Cohn's article "Making College Possible" [April] about President Clinton's plan to democratize higher education interested me greatly...
...Henry Kissinger was the master of this approach, but the quintet who ran the Persian Gulf caper (Bush, Baker, Cheney, Powell, Scowcrofit) closely followed the master's example...
...The superiority of castration over other disincentives or punishment rests less on the effect that castration has on the production of testosterone than on the ability of a threat of castration to touch concern that outranks a man's concern for his own life...
...This shows in the steady dumbing down of curricula, the grade inflation, and the influence on campuses of special-interest groups which preach victimhood...
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...I believe we could profitably adopt the college system found in much of Europe, including Britain...
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...The fact that many therapists preferred to treat neurotics rather than psychotics certainly played a part in the failure of deinstitutionalization, but the failure to medicate was just as important...
...E. Fuller Torrey says that the community mental health movement of the 1960s "operated on the belief that tender loving care and a warm home—as opposed to medication and rehabilitation—were all that patients leaving state mental hospitals needed...
...Many in the mental health community continue to undermine basic human morality and values by supplanting them with newly minted "diseases" and "disorders...
...This concept, however, was predicated on the existence of halfway houses for those who could not live with their families, and the clinics that would provide both counseling and maintenance medication...
...This worthy goal was not met for two reasons: People didn't want mental patients in their communities and failed to provide the necessary support facilities...
...Ask the hundreds of thousands of white-collar workers, including scientists and engineers, who have been laid off over the last few years how much their degrees have helped them since...
Vol. 27 • January 1994 • No. 6
