Book Review

Liberalism Is A Mental Disorder

By Michael Savage (Nelson Current, Publishers, Div. of Thomas Nelson, Inc., Nashville, TN, 221 pp., 2005 (paperback).

Reviewed by Roy Hanu Hart, M.D.

Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder is a thoroughly enjoyable read, yet deeply troubling with its page-by-page message of a society succumbing to an insidious new menace we might call dysmentia [dys, bad + mens, mind], the opposite of eumentia ["healthy thinking"].

Dr. Savage (Ph.D. in nutritional science) describes and explains liberalism as a mental disorder using nontechnical language: "tainted logic," "the insanity of the [left-leaning] American media," "insanities and inanities of extreme leftist thought," "the disorder of liberalism," et cetera, but does not furnish us with a designation from the official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition [DSM-IV].

Essentially, he portrays liberals as functioning with a defective reality-testing apparatus -- their thinking is not cerebrally organized but instead originates from the heart (the seat of emotions in ancient times).

Thus, he writes: "We've gone from a scientific orientation to a tribal [mentality]...The wisdom of the West has now been reduced to an emphasis on feelings and emotions rather than reasoned thinking."

However, the crux of the matter for me is this: diagnostically, there is no DSM-IV category that accounts for the liberals' particular pattern of skewed thinking.

Here and there Savage slips in a technical term -- his book, I am well aware, is designed for the lay reader -- that psychiatrists like myself will find appropriate. For example, he mentions Christophobia, which he defines as "the loathing and hatred of Christianity by bigoted, intolerant, secular leftists." To this he adds: "Thanks to the godless worldview of liberalism, America has become... more and more a society of pagans and paganism." Shades of Don Feder's 1993 A Jewish Conservative Looks at Pagan America!

Savage writes that the "left is obsessed with power." Here we might consider the psychological label of potiphilia [L. potis, potens, powerful + philia, love], "the love of power." The leftist liberals are potiphiliacs. Using the term in its psychological/psychiatric sense (not the way Jay Leno or David Lederman would use it) gives it the air of the pathological.

It should be noted that insanity (employed by Savage in the book) is a legal, not a psychiatric, term. He also uses its opposite, sane, as in: "Where did my sane and safe America go?" It's gone with the wind, to borrow a few words from Margaret Mitchell, thanks in no small part to the liberal fanatics of our time.

Although I have chosen to zero in on psychiatric terminology in this review, there is much more to Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder that can be discussed. I found the author's appendix, "Savagespeak Glossary of Savagisms," both witty and cogent, especially his entry of she-ocracy, "the reigning rule of radical feminism that emasculated America's men." Nowhere else in contemporary culture do we find the insanity of liberalism more destructive than with our sub-population of radical feminists. But that is another story....

In the final analysis, I cannot formulate a suitable differential diagnosis (several possible conditions) for the liberal's wayward pattern of thinking, and find myself limited to a sole DSM-IV entry: Unspecified Mental Disorder (nonpsychotic), which comes closest, in my judgement, to fulfilling Savage's claim that liberalism is a mental disorder.

Unofficially, I have come up with the term dysmentia to capture the essence of the liberal's skewed cognitive approach to reality. Perhaps "Dysmentia (liberalism)" as a diagnosis should be considered for inclusion in the forthcoming DSM-V.