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shortened, the back wards of mental hospitals were unlatched, and efforts were made to integrate career criminals and the severely mentally ill into society, with disastrous results on both fronts. Alcoholism and drug abuse, common in both criminals and psychiatric patients, soared during the seventies, eighties, and early nineties, as did crime rates. Social reformers were baffled by the “sudden” appearance of a “homeless problem.”
    Societal frustration finally led to outcries for more punishment and less counseling, but some of the old naÏveté remains. Recently I heard an “expert” bemoan the fact that so much money was being spent on prisons instead of schools. As if the two were mutually exclusive. As if schooling psychopaths will turn them into model citizens.
    The social theorists of the sixties and seventies mugged language as well. “Riots” were upgraded to “insurrections,” “terrorists” to “freedom fighters.” (This playing fast and loose with the language endures to this day in the world press. It all depends, of course, upon whose ox is being gored. When the PLO blew up school buses in Israel, they were termed guerrillas and freedom fighters by American journalists. The Islamic extremists who blew up American embassies in the Middle East and East Africa were quickly excoriated as terrorists by the same correspondents.)
    During the sixties and seventies, psychopaths were refashioned as
sociopaths.
No longer ill, they were now judged to be victims of persecution.
    Not that this had any salubrious effect upon rates of robbery, rape, and murder. On the contrary, deemphasizing personal responsibility allowed for the continuation of social policies, such as alternative sentencing, early release, and mainstreaming of dangerous criminals into our neighborhoods, that boosted crime statistics.
    So a decade later, when advances in molecular structure and genetics caused a rush to biologize human behavior, the time was ripe for yet another episode of the Rename Game. This belief that every type of behavior has an underlying, traceable biological cause stemmed from an academically generated and media-fed campaign based on tantalizing but very sketchy data. Because journalists tend to be scientifically unsophisticated and eager for print space, they often serve as gullible conduits for the unsubstantiated claims of supposed sages in white coats.
    Science accomplishes wonderful things, but even the hardest science lurches along dim pathways that are shadowed by biases, hunches, and guesswork. Scientists are seldom as knowledgeable—or as effective—as they claim to be.
    Decades after the initial hoopla promulgated by the biological determinists, the level of understanding about the causes and mechanisms of mental and behavioral problems remains primitive, even in instances where medical treatments have proved highly effective, such as medication for psychosis and depression. Thus, we are much better at suppressing schizophrenic symptoms with Thorazine than at figuring out why and how Thorazine works.
    In psychiatry and psychology, most biological explanations have centered around insufficient or disrupted levels of a neurotransmitter (brain chemical) called serotonin, but irregularities in serotonin have been used to explain every psychiatric symptom from obsessive-compulsive behavior to psychosis to depression to psychopathy, creating what is essentially a neurochemical wastebasket with no power to predict or discriminate between individual disorders.
    And once again politics rears its nasty little head. For as the health-care dollar shrinks and jockeying for patients among mental health professionals intensifies, each discipline heads for the heavy artillery. In the case of psychiatrists, it’s the medical degree, and organized psychiatry has fought to medicalize as many behavioral deviances as possible in order to attain control over treatment