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The Napoleon Syndrome

Crazy Leaders There is a drug for paranoid schizophrenia!

One of the most amazing experiences of medical school was actually meeting schizophrenics.  Reading about schizophrenia had not been enough to convince me that these people really had a special illness.   After all, there seems to be enough variation in the behavior of people all around me to imagine that schizophrenia was someplace on the spectrum of how people respond to how they are raised or their environment.

I was wrong. When I met actual patients,  I realized that schizophrenia is very, very real .  The paranoids were especially memorable .not only were they worried about persecution  ( many people, including members of my own family, have that problem)  the paranoid schizophrenics  have a strange  lack of normal emotions  and live in  fantasies about a world very different  than the reality I think I share  with most other people.

Still, I wondered  could there be schizophrenics  who managed to passsociety  by  creating  a world in which their fantasies  became reality ?    Could megalomaniacs  like the Roman emperors  in schizophrenics ?   Was Napoleon living in his fantsy? Were Hitler and Stalin schizophrenics ?   What about folks in today’s world?   Are the Kochs  so rich  that they are able to create an environment  this fits  their fantasies ?

I knew one surgeon  who,  if I were in the business of diagnosing schizophrenia,  I would have to term as schizophrenic .  This fellow had become quite famous .  He had many loyal patients who contributed to a charity designed to support  the surgeon’s own research.   The man was actually quite friendly!   We went on a long walk together when he revealed himself to me.  This physician  his more than just casual relationship with Jesus.   The relationship extended to personal conversations which I’m sure  were every bit as real as the conversations I have  with my own wife.   I even  heard, from clinical colleagues ,  that this surgeon  had been known to go into  fugue states between operations,  a kind of trance  from which he needed to be awakened.   Despite all this,  I was reassured by his clinical colleagues that the man was at least an adequate  surgeon.

My guess is  that the leaders of bizarre states  … Bokar Haram in Nigeria, Kim Jung Un in North Korea, the Caliph of  Iraq/Syria,  and now the strange man calling himself the Prime Minister of Russian Ukraine  suffer from this sort of  paranoid schizophrenia .    I suspect the same disease  afflicts the more bizarre members  of the Tea Party.

For that matter, the leaders of Hamas.  What sort of fantasy world do they live in where they are willing to sacrifice so many lives to their need to drive Israel into the sea?

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