This week the media contained a lot of hype about a certain male celebrity with
the initials CS. Frankly, I was growing incredibly tired of hearing about him
and his shenanigans when I opened Facebook and read the following post:
"If Charlie Sheen had leukemia we would have compassion and empathy for him,"
the mother of a mentally ill adult child said to me over lunch today. I said he
has an incurable disease and hasn't hit bottom. We may not understand the
disease of addiction. We don't understand mental illness and for many it is a
ugly family secret.
To which I felt compelled to weigh in:
"Sorry, but I don't accept that every horrifically behaved individual is
mentally ill. Some are just twisted and bad."
It seems to be a trend today that as soon as someone behaves egregiously, one
can and should assume that they are mentally ill. After all, the logic goes,
if they were in full control of all their capacities, could they possibly
behave this way? Clearly only sociopaths could behave this way. What's a
sociopath? According to my wise and unerring friend Wikipedia, a sociopath is
characterized by the lack of a conscience, the manipulation of others,
dishonesty and the inability to love and/or have lasting and profound personal
relations, and cruelty. Hmmm. Sounds like a bad case of bad character traits.
The Talmud makes a fascinating observation about bad behavior:
"A person does not sin unless a spirit of stupidity enters him."
What on earth does THAT mean? What is a "spirit of stupidity"? Funnily
enough, my friend Wikipedia was surprisingly silent on this one. Here's what
my esteemed high school teacher, Rabbi Dardac, of blessed memory, had to say:
"If a person were in a place of total logic, they could never sin. It's NEVER
worth it to sin. What happens? Our emotions take control and hijack our
logic. It is the most illogical and self-harming thing in the world to do
bad." So on some level, every person who behaves badly has been possessed by
the demon of insanity. It's actually insane to sin! And we all do it!
How do we fix it? Blame our ills on our parents, our nurturing, our character
traits, our DNA, our environment? Never. Playing the blame game has not
proved to be an especially successful way of fixing a problem. Yes, even a
sociopath has the obligation to become a little less sociopathic.
Sure, mental illness exists, but lumping those with "bad behavior syndrome" on
it dimishes the pain of those who are truly suffering with it.
And CS? What's his gig? Honestly, I don't know. And maybe I don't even want
to know. My gig is, what can we learn from this?
