"Choice" Gone Mad: Amputee Wannabes
We are witnessing the beginning of the public normalization of the profound mental illness known as Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID)--also known as "amputee wannabe" because its sufferers become obsessed with losing one or more limbs. This column published in The Guardian is an example: Susan Smith (not her real name) writes about wanting to have both legs amputated because "the image I have of myself has always been one without legs."
To achieve these ends, Susan harmed herself so that one leg would have to be removed. And now, she plans to do it again: "Removing the next leg will not be any easier than the first; the pain will be horrendous. But I have no regrets about the path I have chosen. In fact, if I regret anything, it is that I didn't do this sooner. For the first time in my life, I can get on with being the real me."
And here's the normalizing part: "I think BIID will stay taboo until people get together and bring it out. A hundred years ago, it was taboo to be gay in many societies, and 50 years ago the idea of transsexuals was abhorrent to most. I have tried to make the condition more understood but it is difficult to get a case out in the open by yourself. My psychiatrist went to a meeting last year in Paris, and many doctors there told her that they had operated on people who needed an amputation under mysterious circumstances, and how happy the person was when they woke up. It led them to believe that perhaps BIID is more prevalent than people think."
Something has gone terribly wrong with us at a profound and fundamental level. And deeper minds than mine need to figure out precisely what it is. Because, in the name of "being myself" we are moving toward normalizing mutilating surgery. Indeed, I have already attended a transhumanist conference where two Ph.Ds advocated that doctors be allowed to remove healthy limbs. And it has been suggested as worth considering in a professional journal article, as I wrote here. (And here is an exchange between the authors of the article and me, after they took me to task for my comments in the earlier linked article.) What next? Help people who want to cut themselves slice themselves repeatedly? Or burn themselves, do it safely? Or what about kill themselves? Oh, that's right. It is already explicitly legal to help do that in Oregon, the Netherlands, Belgium,and Switzerland.
People like Susan is need to be protected from harming themselves. We used to have the basic humanity and decency to understand that. But we have become so in the thrall of radical individualism, I wonder whether we still do. "Choice" is becoming a voracious monster.
HT: Gregory Ford
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 2:15 PM
10 Comments
10 Comments:
Sweet gravy and potatos!
"I think BIID will stay taboo until people get together and bring it out. A hundred years ago, it was taboo to be gay in many societies, and 50 years ago the idea of transsexuals was abhorrent to most. I have tried to make the condition more understood but it is difficult to get a case out in the open by yourself."
Okay, this is SO not at all anything like sexual preference and transgenderism. In both cases the brain responds to chemicals differently because of the way it's wired. That's CHEMICAL RESPONSE!
God made the brain to respond to stimuli in order to prolong life and let us be happy and safe. To that end, the brain processes information, and various brains do it in various ways. For example, ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) is useful in tribal societies living in the wilderness - it keeps youngin's from getting eaten. Information processing. Homosexuality and transgenderism are simply brains that are wired differently and thus process information (pheramones, hormones, visual responses, etc) in a different fashion from a heterosexual brain. We can argue from sunup to sunup about the moral and religious responses to homosexuality (Which we are NOT going to do), but none of those beleifs changes the fact that the brain of a gay man or a transgendered person is going to be different from the brain of a straight man comfortable in a male body. That's just the way of the wiring.
But desiring to hurt oneself isn't normal in any way. This isn't a preference, and this isn't simply a brain wired to concieve of itself in a particular fashion. The body is supposed to produce chemicals that will help the soul keep said body alive and healthy for as long as possible.
BIID is a disorder (hence the initial D). Instead of giving signals that the brain uses to distinguish enemies from friends and protect herself, this lady's chemicals are aiming the "enemy" sites at herself! It's like an auto-immune disease. It's an error in the program.
Errors need to be corrected. That's why auto-immune diseases are controlled with medication and that's why she could get medication, too. It's not something that just showed up out of the woodwork. People have had feelings like this for a very long time. It's just more visible because we have the largest ever population on this planet, so more people will have errors in the program, just because there are more of them around.
Instead of trying to band this small sub-population together as some sort of twisted community, she should be striving for advances in medicine and therapy to help her get rid of her self-inflicted pains.
It's so not Taboo. It's not acceptable because people aren't supposed to want to hurt themselves. As my grandmother once said, "That ain't right, that's suicide in small packages."
I've been reading about this for years.
If Susan's psychiatrist is being honest with her, he/she will explain to Susan that amputations will not solve her problems because her limbs are not the problem. She'll lose her legs and then it will be something else. Mental illness is a very complex thing.
To illustrate how ill this woman is, she hasn't even considered how profoundly disturbing losing her limb(s) will be on her children. When my dad lost his hearing when I was three or four, it really bothered me. I remember that I used to have bad dreams about also having to wear a hearing aid. Imagine this!
A mental health professional who knows that a patient has seriously injured herself in the past, and plans to again in the future, should have the woman hospitalized. If not for her sake, for that of her kids.
What in the mindset/culture/worldview of the mental health profession allows a mental health professional to refrain from taking action-like hospitalization-and assents to/affirms the patient's desire in cases like this?
Is this illegal for doctors to do in the U.S.? (I sure hope so!)
Also, is it true as I've read that the UK is particularly friendly to this horror and that there is a "clinic" there where the doctors are esp. known for being willing to remove healthy limbs?
Another point: When things become "acceptable," the professional societies tend to punish doctors and psychiatrists who speak against them or say that there is something wrong. This is certainly true in the U.S. of psychologists and psychiatrists who still take what used to be the more common view that homosexuality is a disorder that shd. be treated. The precedent is thus there for enforcing similar "non-judgmentalism" in this area, too.
There was an episode about this on, I think, Law and Order, some time ago.
But is this worse than a man wanting to have his ... plumbing reorganised so he can pretend to be a woman?
Mutilation is a well-accepted notion in the medical community, it would appear. Along with abortion, which goes way beyond mutilation.
Guilty of putting all different sorts of things in one bag? Undoubtedly.
But I cannot fail to see some connection here, a growing acceptance of what is bizarre and against rational self-interest in the name of the sacrosanct pursuit of some individual quirk, 'my own truth'. Post-modernism goes to medical college. The sickness is spreading. To an operating room near you.
Sleepy ol' bear:
"But is this worse than a man wanting to have his ... plumbing reorganised so he can pretend to be a woman?"
Not really. I talk about brain function where sexuality is concerned because the soul is not engendered (it says so in the Bible), so something has to control the sex drive, and that has to be the brain. But why someone would risk his life in surgery (and in England the yahoos there let a 17-year-old-kid do it!!) is beyond me. You can suppress the more violent reactions with hormones. Hell, the body doesn't even settle down until you're about 25!
"Mutilation is a well-accepted notion in the medical community, it would appear. Along with abortion, which goes way beyond mutilation."
Actually, abortion is not reallly well-accepted in the *entire* medical community. Removing a fetus that passed away from natural causes, or removing a fetus that is lodged in the falopian tube, those are things that many doctors can handle doing, but actually removing a perfectly healthy fetus? You almost *have* to go to a clinic at this point. Maybe it's gaining greater acceptance. Who knows? About the only thing *I* know is that my classmates in college talked about being referred to various clinics after a visit to the hospital or their Ob/Gyn.
You're right, it goes beyond mutilation, so doctors have very different opinions about it, and many are reserved.
"But I cannot fail to see some connection here, a growing acceptance of what is bizarre and against rational self-interest in the name of the sacrosanct pursuit of some individual quirk, 'my own truth'."
Doing harm to the body is a violation of God's law, but not everybody believes that, and that's when you get people trying to allow everybody's individual "truth," so that folks don't like Christians are shoving their religion down a non-believer's throat. Anybody who has any kind of moral objection to something should be allowed to say, "I object to this," explain his case, and be respected. The important thing is to listen to those objections and decide from them.
That's why I love a good debate, especially with people who don't hold the same views I do - I love the information exchange. The problem is most folks don't respect the right of the other side to have an opinion, especially if it infringes on another person's "choice."
We should remember that morality, no matter where it comes from (God, nature, etc) exists to protect both the individual and the human population.
Funny, I've used something like this to explain why abortion is an odd case: if you went to the doctor and said you didn't want your arm anymore, he wouldn't remove it, wouldn't refer you to a surgeon, he'd refer you to a shrink.
Or at least, that's what I thought would happen.
Dear YCW: That is changing fast. Doctors are becoming order takers in some circumstances.
Dear Young Christian Woman:
About the only hope we have is that there are some decent doctors, who really understand the disorder, who refuse to give in. Everyone needs to struggle against treating human bodies like random meat.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home