{"id":854,"date":"2007-04-18T20:06:00","date_gmt":"2007-04-18T20:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=854"},"modified":"2007-04-18T20:06:00","modified_gmt":"2007-04-18T20:06:00","slug":"the-student-is-psycho-what-then","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=854","title":{"rendered":"The Student is Psycho–What Then?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr. Helen Smith continues blogging on the problems of dealing with “time bomb” students<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I had one such experience, and it illustrates how difficult it is for universities to deal with them.<\/p>\n

She was a “non-traditional” (30-something) student in one of my upper-division nonfiction writing classes. One day she brought in for workshopping an article about Satanists in our city. It was all very 1980s “satanic panic<\/a>” stuff, only a decade later.<\/p>\n

But the stunning part was that she accused an education professor at our university of being the local Satanic leader. He not only knew where the bodies were buried, she claimed, he had put some of them in the ground himself.<\/p>\n

And not one of the mass comm. majors in the room suggested that this might, possibly, be libelous. I suppose they were waiting for me. And I let her go (“Very interesting . . um. . . who’s next.”) I faced bad writing before, but not 24-caret craziness.<\/p>\n

After class I went straight to the office of one of the senior people in my department who mentored me. “What do I do?” I asked her. “Tell [Dept. Chairman],” she said.<\/p>\n

I went to his office with a copy of the satanism article. He already knew about the student, knew that she did not have both oars in the water, and that she had been kicked out of the teacher-training program by Education Professor. She had been allowed to change her major to English. He suggested talking to the counseling office, and that was all he could offer.<\/p>\n

I ended up in a surreal conversation with the director of student counseling, who was also well-acquainted with Nutcase Student. Her response went something like this:<\/p>\n

“Because of privacy rules, I cannot discuss a particular case. However, if I knew that a student was behaving that way, and if I knew that she had a psychiatrist in the city, I might possibly suggest to that psychiatrist that her medications be adjusted.”<\/p>\n

I called Education Professor at home and got his wife instead. She was seriously concerned that Nutcase Student was stalking her husband and also that he did not recognize the danger. When I spoke to him, he did try to downplay the situation.<\/p>\n

Time passed. Nutcase stopped coming to my class, for which I was thankful. <\/p>\n

Then I had a call from the provost’s secretary. (The provost is the university official in charge of academic affairs.) <\/p>\n

It turned out that Nutcase Student had shown up at Education Professor’s door about 2 a.m. with a knife. She was arrested and spent some time in jail. All faculty members who had had contact with her were being notified that she was now back on the street. And did I want a university security guard to sit in on my class?<\/p>\n

I said no. And Nutcase never returned. But when the call came, it was late afternoon, and I felt very alone in my office on the long, echoing corridor.<\/p>\n

She was no Cho Seung-Hui<\/a>. But the pattern was there<\/a>: <\/p>\n

The violence-prone individual is more likely to have enduring personality pathology, such as a paranoid, schizoid, narcissistic, or antisocial personality, and a long history of difficult interpersonal relationships. He may ruminate about perceived slights or injustices for months or even years.<\/em><\/p>\n

The counseling office cannot help someone who does not want help. Faculty members get no more advice beyond, “Be careful.” And, ironically, the advent of new psychotropic medications mean that more mentally disturbed people can sign up for higher education. They can get government-guaranteed loans too, just like the rest of the students.<\/p>\n

Dr. Helen ends up regarding this as a civil rights issue–for university staff and other students.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Helen Smith continues blogging on the problems of dealing with “time bomb” students. I had one such experience, and it illustrates how difficult it is for universities to deal with them. She was a “non-traditional” (30-something) student in one of my upper-division nonfiction writing classes. One day she brought in for workshopping an article […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[4,54],"class_list":["post-854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-scholarship","tag-teaching"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-dM","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2315,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2315","url_meta":{"origin":854,"position":0},"title":"CFP: Religious and Literary Satanism","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 31, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Call for papers: Satanism is a subject that has always drawn a lot of media attention as well as interest from the general public. Scholarly studies of the subject, however, have more often focused on socially constructed \"Satanic Panics\" than on Satanism as a religious alternative in itself. Recently, this\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Satanism\"","block_context":{"text":"Satanism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=satanism"},"img":{"alt_text":"Contemporary Religious Satansim","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ashgate.com\/images\/9780754652861.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6794,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6794","url_meta":{"origin":854,"position":1},"title":"Satan in Northern Ireland","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 17, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Dennis Wheatley (1897\u20131977),\u00a0 British military intelligence operative and author of occult-horror novels, is supposed to have left the \"strategic military deception\" trade after World War II, but his spirit evidently lived on. According to a recent article in The Guardian newspaper, during \"the Troubles\" \u2014 the period of conflict between\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Ireland\"","block_context":{"text":"Ireland","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=ireland"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3308,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3308","url_meta":{"origin":854,"position":2},"title":"“Sybil,” the Fraudulent Book that Built a Movement","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 17, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Debbie Nathan, a journalist whose work did a lot to bring down the \"Satanic panic\" movement of the 1980s, has now turned her literary guns on a classic of my young adulthood: Sybil, supposedly a true story of a girl with multiple personalities. Debbie Nathan\u2019s \u201cSybil Exposed\u201d is about psychiatric\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"psychology\"","block_context":{"text":"psychology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=psychology"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":988,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=988","url_meta":{"origin":854,"position":3},"title":"When Librarians Strike Back","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 24, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"A fairly brilliant fund-raising idea in Alamogordo, New Mexico: funding a new library with photos of a local book-burning.The book burning pitted two opposing points of view. It was \"not a book-burning, but a holy bonfire,\" according to the church's founding pastor, Jack Brock.....On one side [of the street] were\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"libraries\"","block_context":{"text":"libraries","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=libraries"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5970,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5970","url_meta":{"origin":854,"position":4},"title":"So You Want to Worship the Old Gods . . .","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 22, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"There are people who think that in order to do so, you have to learn \"their\" language, as spoken centuries ago, because the gods don't keep up or something, let alone communicate in non-verbal ways. All right, then. You want to deal with Werunos (Sanskrit, Varuna), keeper of cosmic order?\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"archaeology\"","block_context":{"text":"archaeology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=archaeology"},"img":{"alt_text":"Hipster-Jon-Snow-game-of-thrones-23594329-362-500","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/Hipster-Jon-Snow-game-of-thrones-23594329-362-500.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":12197,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=12197","url_meta":{"origin":854,"position":5},"title":"Lucifer, Women, Witches, Freedom","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 20, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Here Caroline Tully offers a detailed review of Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Women in Nineteenth-Century Culture by Per Faxneld. This is more a literary than a religious Satanism, although any story of Satan has its religious underpinnings: Although they attributed positive qualities to the figure of Satan,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"folklore\"","block_context":{"text":"folklore","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=folklore"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/satanic-197x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}