John C. Bailey: Psychopathology may have had role at Penn State

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John C. Bailey: Psychopathology may have had role at Penn State
http://www.lenconnect.com/opinions/...ychopathology-may-have-had-role-at-Penn-State

Let me tell you a story about a group of people estimated to make up to 1 percent to 4 percent of the population. They are called psychopaths. The term psychopath is very controversial and complicated; however, in a nutshell, it is thought that psychopaths are characterized by the inability to care about others, no concerns whatsoever with any other person’s wants, needs, goals or dreams. Psychopaths don’t feel shame, guilt or remorse for their actions, and thoughts of morality, honesty, honor, respect and ethical practices are replaced with words like collateral damage, deception and the ends justify the means. They have no problem placing money, success or even winning over human life. People are tools to them and their only value lies in how they can be used.

Interesting concept. Joe Paterno is a control freak who gets angry easily.
 
Pathological Systems: A Look at Penn State

The nation is aghast at the Penn State sexual abuse/rape

Published on November 17, 2011 by Sandra Brown, M.A. in Pathological Relationships

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog...s/201111/pathological-systems-look-penn-state

............While Pennsylvania's mandated reporting laws are disgustingly inept, requiring some to simply report it to their boss, university staffs somewhere down the line are trained in reporting protocols for both the university and the state since they work with students. A naked adult with a naked child is a crime...not just legally, but morally and ethically. Pathology is the absence of moral reasoning...........

We miss seeing that when pathologicals are at the head guiding the system, they are making deep psychological imprints of their own pathological world views projected like a cult-reality on the screen of other's psyches. That's it not just an individual that can be sick, its entire systems that are guided by pathological and psychopathic belief systems. (Anyone ever read Snakes in Suits by the world's leading expert in white collar psychopathic behavior, Dr. Robert Hare?)

It took a system not just an individual to cover up 15 years of rape. It took the camaraderie of people who collectively had reduced empathy and conscience to hide the fact that little boys were penetrated, and kids were trafficked to psychopathic benefactors. Now there are allegations that the rape and assault of little boys were used as perks to pedophile benefactors. It's called human trafficking.

This did not happen in a vacuum as most trafficking, extended abuse, and cover up normally doesn't. It takes individual and corporate pathology to create an environment of longevity and invisibility to perpetrate 15 years of rape. It takes pathology on many levels from being the pedophile to being a silent accessory to the crime to allow over a decade of soul destroying abuse in a psychopathic fraternity of football narcissism. .............

Think all of the players in this pedophilic drama are not likely pathological? Want to split hairs about which Cluster B diagnosis they are likely to fall into and our inability to really diagnosis someone if they aren't in front of us? I don't. You can clearly see from this case what happens when someone does not have enough empathy, enough insight into how their behavior affects others, enough guilt, enough conscience, or enough remorse.

Whether the perps and accessories are cleanly in the ranges of secure diagnosis really doesn't matter because even reduced amounts of these traits-of-humanity have caused pathological results in the lives of children. ..............

The Psychopathic Checklist helps us view elements of pathology that can perhaps help us to expand the view to see pathology active not in just a person but in a system. I have check marked those that I think we can apply to the pathological belief system of the department/portions of departments that were involved. (Below is the Psychopathy Checklist- Revised created by Dr. Robert Hare).

♦ Glibness/superficial charm (at least applicable to the charm and support and near-riots of the followers of Paterno).

Grandiose sense of self-worth (entitled to not follow the mandated reporting laws of child abuse)

♦Pathological lying

♦Cunning/manipulative (the years this has continued is a tribute to cunning ability to hide it and/or manipulate others into not telling)

♦Lack of remorse or guilt

More at link.....
 
In Plain View
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/09/24/120924crat_atlarge_gladwell?currentPage=all

Sandusky was a hugger and a grabber and a cutup. “He liked practical jokes and messing around, knocking a guy’s hat off his head, making prank calls, sneaking up behind people to startle them,” Posnanski goes on. People at Penn State thought of him as “a knucklehead.” Much of Sandusky’s 2000 autobiography, “Touched,” is devoted to stories of his antics: the time he smeared charcoal over the handset of his chemistry teacher’s phone, the time he ran afoul of a lifeguard for horseplay with his children in a public pool. Four and a half pages alone are devoted to water-balloon fights that he orchestrated while in college. “Wherever I went, it seemed like trouble was sure to follow,” Sandusky writes. He was a kid at heart. “I live a good part of my life in a make-believe world,” he continues. “I enjoyed pretending as a kid, and I love doing the same as an adult with these kids. Pretending has always been part of me.” There was a time when one of the kids he was mentoring became “cold and unresponsive” to him. It upset him. He writes:

“You know it’s not right to treat people like this,” I told him. “You should talk to me.” The boy laid into me, screaming from the top of his lungs. “Get out of here! Get out of here!” His voice echoed into the hallway and staff people came rushing into the room. I looked at him with sincere tears in my eyes. “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me,” I said quietly as I walked out of the room.


Paterno did not like Sandusky. They argued openly. Paterno found Sandusky’s goofiness exasperating, and the trail of kids following him around irritated Paterno no end. He considered firing Sandusky many times. But, according to Posnanski, he realized that he needed Sandusky—that the emotional, bear-hugging, impulsive knucklehead was a necessary counterpart to his own discipline and austerity. Sandusky never accepted any of the job offers that would have taken him away from Penn State, because he could not leave the Second Mile. But he also stayed because of Paterno. What could be better, for his purposes, than a boss with eyes only for the football field, who dismissed him as an exasperating, impulsive knucklehead? Pedophiles cluster in professions that give them access to vulnerable children—teaching, the clergy, medicine. But Sandusky’s insight, if you want to call it that, was that the culture of football could be the greatest hiding place of all, a place where excessive physicality is the norm, where horseplay is what often passes for wit, where young men shower together after every game and practice, and where those in charge spend their days and nights dreaming only of new defensive schemes.
 

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