Immersion Therapy: Writer From Mother Jones Grows Obsessed With Tale of Another Woman's Rape, and Suffers, She Thinks, From Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder by Proxy: Arranges For A Guy To Sexually Assault Her

And I'm avoiding the "r" word because it looks pretty forbidding in a headline. But that's the service she requested.

Now, this is absurd, of course. There is no "post traumatic stress disorder by proxy," that is, PTSD not from your own trauma but simply from hearing of another's. The first time I ever heard of this odd clinical diagnosis was from Doctor Chris Matthews of the Hardball Institute for Made-Up Psychoses, who postulated that the Fort Hood Murderer killed people because he, as a psychiatrist, had by traumatized by listening to veterans tell of their own traumas.

Or, maybe, because he was a jihadi. Either/or.

Now, this woman is claiming a similar PTSD by proxy syndrome. But I have an alternate diagnosis: She was already long a sexual neurotic and probably suffered from eight different dementias long before she reported on a Haiti rape victim; this was merely the trigger for doing something nutty to scratch this itch.

Mac McClelland, a civil rights reporter who has seen the impact of sexual violence around the globe, couldn't shake the image of Sybille, a woman who said she had been raped at gunpoint and mutilated in the aftermath of Haiti's catastrophic 2010 earthquake.

While on assignment for Mother Jones last September, McClelland said she accompanied Sybille to the hospital when the woman saw her attackers and went into "a full paroxysm -- wailing, flailing" in terror.

Something snapped in McClelland, too. She became progressively enveloped in the classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress -- avoidance of feelings, flashbacks and recurrent thoughts that triggered crying spells. There were smells that made her gag.

McClelland, 31, sought professional help but said she ultimately cured herself by staging her own rape, which she writes about in a haunting piece for the online magazine Good. The title: "How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD."

Her sexual partner mercilessly pinned her, beat her about the head and brutally violated McClelland -- at her request.

"I was not crazy," she told ABCNews.com. "It was a way for me to deal in sort of a simulated, but controlled situation. I could say 'stop' at any time...."

Which really means it's not a rape at all; it's merely sexual role-play, which tens of thousands of people do. And by speaking of it as "rape" she demeans rape, but I'm sure she'll get a lot of you-go-girls from the feminists because, well, you go girl.

Women are to be praised for everything.

By the way, some readers of Mother Jones called this headcase a "racist" which means of course she must have asked a black guy to do this (and identified him as such in the article.)

So, either a racist or you go girl.

What does this mean, politically? Not a lot, but the left has always been sanctum for people with a particular set of pathologies. People who are, in purely clinical terms, Totally Head-Fucked and who Suck At Life.

Of course, yonder on the far/wingnut right are some people with a different set of pathologies, but we hardly need to speak of them, as the MSM talks about them all day long and speaks as if we're all nuts.

But, anyway, there are a lot of identity/gender confused individuals and people who have some kind of longstanding, incurable childhood trauma to work out, some sort of dysfunction in social settings and general alienation from the mass of humanity.

Or some parental sexual issue. That's always a popular one.

Or of course: Attention Whore Complex With Advanced Drama Queen Aspect. That might be the diagnosis that best fits the available evidence.

Psychiatrists give such people psychotropic medications; leftists give them book deals.

BTW: When I say there's no such thing as second-hand PTSD (when you traumatize someone, you also traumatize everyone they'll tell about it; kind of like the videotape in The Ring), I'm not being factual, but opinionated.

I am 99.9% sure that psychiatrists have actually created a dumb Second-Hand PTSD diagnosis.

I'm sayin' it's bullshit.

Isn't This Pretty Exhibitionist? Does she really need to make her "therapy" such a public spectacle?

Or is that rather the point?

posted by Ace at 03:54 PM

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