EVIL LIBERAL CULTURE GAVE ELLIOT RODGER TOO LITTLE MENTAL HEALTH CARE, OR TOO MUCH, OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT

So what was Elliot Rodger's problem? Instapundit's wife, Dr. Helen Smith, said on Saturday that it was lack of mental health care. You see, young men never get the mental health care they need, thanks to evil feminists:

The Elliot Rodger Case: If Pick-Up Artists Are Guilty, Then So Are the Feminists

... Judgy Bitch makes the best interpretation I have seen thus far:

The fact is that Elliot's outburst does indeed highlight an issue of central importance to the MHRM [Men's Human Rights Movment] - the inadequate, almost non-existent treatment of mental health problems for young men. Socially, our treatment seems to be to wait until the tortured young man puts a bullet in his own head, and just pray that he doesn't take innocent victims with him.

As a strategy for health, it's not working very well.

Compare that to how we respond to women who are mentally fragile after giving birth. We screen for Post Partum Depression and throw money and resources into keeping both the women and their children safe, because if we don't do that, a lot of babies will end up dead. Women struggle with mental issues, too, and take it out on the innocent. But rather than ignore those women and hope for the best, we create programs designed to identify and help them.

Perhaps it is the feminists and their supporters who block funding and education going to boys' and men's issues that are to blame....

As a psychologist who has worked with men and boys for over 20 years, I can say that our society is devoid of programs and help for mental health issues for men or we try to give help that is not helpful. We focus on women and forget that boys and men have problems too.

No, she hasn't taken this post down, or updated it to acknowledge the significant amount of mental health care Rodger received throughout his life. (Being right-wing means never having to say you're sorry.) In fact, Robert Stacy McCain recommended the post just this morning, saying, "Dr. Helen is a psychologist who has specialized in studying male violence and is also the author of Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream -- and Why It Matters. If anybody is an actual expert in this area, she is." Um, maybe -- but she's not an expert on currently available facts.

Michelle Malkin's Twitchy thinks the problem is just the opposite:

One of the many dubious memes coming out of Friday's shooting in Isla Vista, Calif., is that Elliot Rodger simply needed some tender, loving psychiatric care....

Aw, the poor baby just needed a little "help" -- presumably from a mental health professional. Just one problem with that theory: In his manifesto, Rodger revealed that he was being seen by one of the best-known psychiatrists in Southern California as well as several therapists/counselors.

So evil feminist culture denied him psychiatric treatment and evil Hollyweird culture lavished him with mollycoddling therapists -- who, by the way, probably made him sicker, according to Reason's Brendan O'Neill:

Yes, he might have spent some late nights lurking on "men's rights" websites, but if the reports coming from those who knew him are to be believed, he spent 14 years visiting therapists.

To my mind, if we are going to say that any kind of "culture" was responsible for Rodger's rampage ... then we might want to examine the impact of mainstream therapy culture rather than obsessing over the fringe misogyny culture he might have dabbled with.

We know a handful of things about Rodger. One is that he visited therapists. Another is that he was full of self-regard, was incredibly self-obsessed, and was utterly outraged when people, especially women, didn't treat him with the love and respect he felt he deserved.

It is possible that these two things are connected, maybe even intimately connected. For one of the main, and most terrifying, achievements of the modern cult of therapy has been to churn out a generation of people completely focused on the self and in constant need of validation from others; a generation that thinks nothing of spending hours examining and talking about their inner lives and who regard their own self-esteem as sacrosanct, something which it is unacceptable for anyone ever to dent or disrespect.

... Therapy culture has created a new army of little gods made fearsomely angry by any perceived insult against their self-esteem. It has generated groups of people who, like something out of the Old Testament, think nothing of squishing things that offend them or hurt their sense of self-worth. It has made a whole new anti-social generation whose desire to protect themselves from emotional harm overrides the older human instinct to engage with other people and be tolerant of their differences. When Rodger says "I am a living god," he is speaking, not from any kind of wacky religious script, but from the mainstream bible of therapy.

So the therapy that Dr. Helen thinks castrating feminists denied Rodger was actually what made him kill people, and what turned him into a sociopath. (According to O'Neill, human history apparently contained no sociopaths -- "people who ... think nothing of squishing things that offend them or hurt their sense of self-worth" -- until the development of psychotherapy.)

In an case, it's all liberal culture's fault, as usual.

****

Bonus idiocy, from Dr. Helen's PJ Media colleague Bryan Preston:

Basically, the killer was a rich kid who was frustrated that he wasn't richer, connected to an industry obsessed by beauty that has its deeply ugly side too. Rather than work to achieve whatever his goals were, he felt entitled to own the world, setbacks led to more frustration, and he lashed out with deadly force. We could talk about the values we're no longer teaching our kids, that we're no longer even allowed to teach them. We could talk about mental illness treatment, in the context of a government that prioritizes abortifacient mandates and gutting the Bill of Rights while neglecting healthcare for veterans. But instead, we’ll all become familiar with the killer’s details and we'll fight about guns again. Even though even the most radical Democrat surely knows by now that they’re not getting our guns, period. Not gonna happen.

So: Rodger was concerned with money, not sex (pay no attention to what Rodger actually said, obsessively, about sex). Rodger actually should have had better mental health treatment, but President Obama -- who has a hand in everything! -- was so busy killing VA patients and mandating that Catholic employers provide sex pills that Rodgers couldn't see a shrink. Oh, and the bit about "the values we're no longer teaching our kids, that we're no longer even allowed to teach them"? That's probably a reference to telling kids that gays are evil. (Yeah, I'm sure things would have gone much better on Friday night if Rodger had internalized that message as well.)

Oh, and don't you dare take our guns. Never forget that.