In the last 24 hours, a video clip of a Texas judge beating his teenage daughter (for the crime of downloading music) has gone viral on the internet and news media. It’s a horrendous video, involving not only brutal violence but also vicious humiliation of a child by a parent. What makes the story more provocative still is that the daughter, 16 years old at the time, has cerebral palsy, the father is a judge who presides over child welfare issues, and, oh yeah, he was apparently addicted to opiates.
There’s little doubt that, as the story spins out in various directions, the issue of opiate addiction will hit the spotlight. While thousands clamour for the judge’s dismissal or worse, even his daughter, the victim of the abuse, says he needs rehabilitation instead. Could opiate addiction possibly explain this kind of behaviour? Could it excuse it?
There are drug families that change the personality in fundamental ways, as a direct result of brain damage. But it’s pretty clear what those drugs are: methamphetamine and crack are the most infamous culprits, and inhalants such as gasoline and various solvents also destroy cells up and down the nervous system. But opiates don’t damage the brain, in and of themselves, unless you OD, in which case you can lose a little, a lot, or all of your brain.
Yet some of the byproducts of opiate addiction can lead to behaviour problems so severe that the question of brain damage becomes a matter of definition. The first byproduct is craving itself. In a recent post, I compared the addict’s craving brain to that of an animal in a state of starvation. That’s not an analogy. The parallels are concrete. Drug craving laces the brain with dopamine, replacing the role of other neuromodulators. Thanks to massive gouts of dopamine in the ventral striatum, there is only one goal to pursue, and all the animal’s attention and behaviour is focused on that goal. But that doesn’t sound like the judge’s problem. Craving takes attention away from other people. The good judge was overly attentive to his daughter.
Withdrawal is another byproduct of opiate addiction. As junkies and drug counsellors know all too well, the physical discomfort of withdrawal symptoms produces a high level of irritability. Neurochemicals that have an arousing impact on brain and body (e.g., corticotropin-releasing factor, an ingredient of the stress response) are suppressed by opiates. When the opiates begin to leave the system, these neurochemicals rebound with a vengeance, yielding a state of agitation and hyperarousal. And with many common painkillers, that can happen within 6-24 hours following the last dose. So, was the judge going through withdrawal at the time of the beating? Probably not. The video clip, posted on Youtube (not fun to watch!) shows anger and methodical aggression, but there is no sign of the twitchy irritability that characterizes withdrawal.
I think the judge suffered from a more common ailment caused, not only by addiction, but by almost any kind of personal failure; and that’s shame. Shame is a powerful emotion, and it’s one of the few emotions that literally hurts. That cringing, crumpling feeling deep inside, the wish to fall through the cracks in the floor, to disappear from the world, because one’s own self is just so despicable — that hurts! Addiction to anything is shameful. It feels like, and perhaps is, a personal failure. But abusing a helpless child, over whom one holds both power and responsibility, is at least as shameful, and maybe a whole lot more. Being an addict and an abuser…well you see where I’m going. So the judge, like many violent people, was probably responding to and at the same time inducing intense feelings of shame. In himself.
Does that excuse his behaviour? Not at all. Shame doesn’t make you harm others. Shame is painful, and it elicits all kinds of defences. Violence is one of those defences, but to roll up your sleeves and indulge in it, to watch yourself doing it and not stop, is unjustifiable — especially for a justice of the peace. It’s one thing to abuse yourself: not nice, not logical, but you’re the one who suffers. It’s quite another thing to abuse someone else as a way to make yourself feel better.
Leave a Reply to Peter Cancel reply