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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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Doctor scuttlebutt is that the patient wasn't psychiatric - pure personality.

How do you define this though? Not to cast aspersions on the doctors but the inherent nature of mental health diagnosis means that declaring somebody absolutely sane isn't the same as saying 'they don't currently have a broken leg'. The whole system is clearly creaking under an unwillingness/inability to actually handle whatever small % of genuine social defectors which then produces people rushing to palm them off on some other subsystem in order for them to no longer be their problem.

This means something very specific in a medical context, yes people can have personality problems in the sense that you mean outside of healthcare and end up in prison, but we have a specific suite of diagnostic identities called "personality disorders" (the most famous are probably: anti-social, borderline, and narcissistic) that represents a pattern of maladaptive personality features with a somewhat known cause that don't respond to medication and barely response to non-medical interventions like therapy.

Patients with these disease processes sometimes end up in a psychiatric hospital because of behaviors that are dangerous (towards themselves or others), but the purpose of a psychiatric hospital is to begin the acute stabilization process, if someone can't be helped by a psychiatric hospital and engages the in dangerous and illegal behavior than the correct location for them is prison, while in prison someone can try and treat comorbidities and begin loooooooooongitudinal therapy.