Peter Hitchens depresses me. But I won’t kill him.
I know Peter Hitchens is a proll - a professional troll. His entire reason for existing is to try and say something sufficiently outrageous or unjustifiable that it gets him some attention. He has no logic to his arguments - it's just a series of random thoughts, which if they came from anyone else would be instantly ignored as the slightly twatty ramblings of an idiot. But because it's the Hitch, someone who's mysteriously regarded as being intelligent, despite all the evidence to the contrary, he is elevated to a level beyond the average pub bore - or the average crap blogger - to someone who gets a column in a national newspaper.
He's written two pieces today, and while one of them is entitled "Israel wasn't tough enough", it's not that piece of flame-bait that I want to concentrate on. However, it does give an indication as to the kind of schtick these people have - think about an issue, think about the most contrarian and least plausible position that a human being could possibly hold, then go for it and take it to the nth degree. If you were to indulge in the kind of 'psychobabble' that Hitch rips into in the piece I'm about to look at, you might say he is like an infant rubbing shit over his face to try and get attention from his parents. But that might be unkind. To shit-covered infants.
No, the piece I want to talk about is one in which he speculates, without any evidence whatsoever other than the clunkings in his tiny brain, that antidepressants were somehow to blame for Derrick Bird's horrific crimes. He writes:
Patrick Purdy, culprit of the 1989 Cleveland School massacre in Stockton, California, had been on anti-depressants. Jeff Weise, perpetrator of the March 2005 Red Lake High School massacre, was on anti-depressants.
Anti-depressants were found in the cabin of the ‘Unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski. Michael McDermott, culprit of the 2000 ‘Wakefield massacre’ in Massachusetts, was on anti-depressants.
Kip Kinkel, culprit of a 1998 murder spree in Oregon, was on anti-depressants.
John Hinckley, who tried to kill Ronald Reagan in 1981, was on anti-depressants.It is both interesting and worrying that, with so many such unhinged and otherwise inexplicable killings perpetrated by people taking legal medication, the official world has been so slow to look into the matter.
It’s so much easier to pass a pointless, populist gun ban.
Not really, Hitch. Hey, you appear to have left out all of the examples of people carrying out mass murders without having been prescribed antidepressants. But I forgot, we're in 'only connect' territory, where whatever dumbfuck theory you come up with is legitimate, because you can just go searching for the things that confirm what you think, while discarding anything - even if it's a majority of the evidence - that doesn't fit your tedious little theory. And of course there are the other explanations, one which anyone can grasp if they bother to think about it - that the prescription of antidepressants might be because of depression, which may have been a contributory factor (if not the main factor) in the murder-suicides, and that it might not have been the antidepressants which caused the violence; rather, they may have been an attempt to deal with a depressive symptom of a much wider personality disorder.
No. Of course not. If you're Hitch, it must be the antidepressants causing the murders. I love the way he says it's 'so much easier' to pass a 'populist' gun ban; whereas in fact, it is he who is doing the 'so much easier' in all of this, while attempting to represent himself as the deep thinker. He isn't. He's just a jerk, a tedious attention-seeking little prick. I don't know if he's entirely deluded by his grandiose dream of being so much more clever than everyone else in the world; I don't know if he's just being provocative for the sake of it, and doesn't care at all whether what he says might be accurate, or truthful, or entirely misleading, or just trolling bullshit. I don't know, and to be quite honest I don't care.
Of course, this is the Daily Mail, where mental health issues are breezily dismissed with what you might call a depressing regularity. Janet Street-Porter recently lied like this:
No, it isn't. It's not the new trendy illness at all. (I'm aware, by the way, that JSP doesn't write the headlines, but that stinking article wasn't unfairly represented by the headline, which was a reasonable summary of the hateful 'never did me any harm' just-world fallacy unpleasantness below). But this is the kind of attitude that you get from the nasty prolls of the Mail. I wonder whether it might have anything to do with the kind of "every man for himself" attitude of the libertarian right, or whether these people are simpletons who are unwilling or unable to wonder that other human beings might possibly experience the universe in a different way to the way they do. If it's the latter, I pity them really, because they're emotionally still just children. If it's the former, I despise them.
There are clues as to which one it is. Hitchens comes out with some stuff that's so patently absurd that you have to wonder if he really thinks about anything at all before he starts typing:
It’s possible an old-fashioned village constable, on the spot, might have done something to halt Derrick Bird, or have realised something bad was going to happen before it did.
Why? It's not explained. Don't you go thinking that Hitchens ever actually explains the long-range salvoes he launches at his targets; they just keep getting lauched. It boils down to: "Somehow, everything is bad, because, oh the Left, and things aren't what they used to be, therefore, yes, I'm right." And that, somehow, is seen as being satisfactory. Hitchens doesn't have evidence; he just guesses. He just wonders aloud:
Was Bird taking the anti-depressant pills that are now prescribed so readily by NHS doctors to so many people whose lives – like Bird’s – have gone down the drain?
I don't know, was he? Maybe you could wait a bit before you decide that it was antidepressants that made him do what he did, if you don't even know that he was even taking them? No...? OK, just wildly speculate away. It's not as if there are several grieving families this week and it might be a tad disrespectful to them, if they themselves might be taking antidepressants - or may even be prescribed them to try and cope with the awfulness of what has happened - to say that it might make them killers, just like the man who took their loved ones away? Oh hang on, it is.
I'm quite happy to say that I am still taking antidepressants. To the best of my knowledge, I'm not about to go and start murdering people at random. It might be true to find evidence that some murderers take antidepressants, but at the same time, you will find evidence that a lot of them also drank Coca-Cola, or ate potatoes, or took aspirin, or drank beer. And a lot of others didn't. Hitchens is so woefully wide of the mark, so far from establishing a causal link, that it's embarrassing that any publication, anywhere in the world, would consider his pitiful waste of words worthy of putting on a printed page. All that ink... all that paper wasted. What a waste.
I know Hitch is a proll, and that creating any kind of response, even if it's a weary "Jesus Christ you twerp, what the fuck have you written this time, you shambolic fool?" is exactly what probably drives him. But these kinds of myths don't help anyone. It's disrespectful to the victims of this tragedy to be idly speculating about such matters, without any evidence whatsoever to back it up. Not that Hitchens cares, you understand. For him, it's business as usual. Israel wasn't tough enough. Mass murders are caused by antidepressants. There, job done.
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Hello. I'm a Bristol-based writer and soon-to-be-redundant journalist. You can read more about me and the Enemies site here, or follow me on Twitter. Email me if you like - antonvowl at live dot co dot uk
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June 6th, 2010 - 13:00
That is truly moronic – no wonder his brother is taking US citizenship, I feel dirty sharing a national identity with the oaf, let alone DNA.
But, over in La-La Land there’ll be those who shake their heads sadly and think, ‘so true’.
June 6th, 2010 - 13:08
Totally agree with every word, including that Hitchen’s doesn’t give a fig’s arse. As long as people like this are given a ‘legitimate’ voice by national papers they will continue to think that there is nothing wrong with espousing this fatuous crap.
June 6th, 2010 - 13:24
I’d love to grab hold of Hitchens and show him how anti-depressants have stopped me from harming myself – and possibly others – and enabled me to get my life on track. Not that it would make any difference to him, nor the editors who employ him, but it would be nice to think he looked at some actual evidence for once.
No-one but Derrick Bird will ever know why he did what he did but Hitchens, in my opinion a man with as much empathy as a lump of granite, is almost bound to be further from the truth than anyone else.
I apologise unreservedly to granite and all other rocks and minerals should they feel defamed by their inclusion above.
June 6th, 2010 - 13:36
I read a really interesting post yesterday about SSRI antidepressants and the alleged link to suicide: http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/2010/05/ssris-and-suicide.html
It’s refreshing to read science writing that actually addresses the evidence for a change!
June 6th, 2010 - 13:53
He’s a tiresome little fuck, to be sure, but to me more petty and downright annoying than his idiotic “populism” is his obsession with belittling public figures by extending their names. “Anthony Blair” and “Nicholas Clegg” among others have got this treatment. It just smacks of the faux intellectualism he prides himself on, as well as his characteristically self-righteous persona.
Cunt.
June 6th, 2010 - 14:43
I am rather surprised Hitch didn’t attribute these mass killings to the works of Charles Darwin and our “godless society”.
June 6th, 2010 - 16:05
I’ve been taking anti-depressants since 2005, and have yet to go on a murderous spree. On the other hand, I can see how someone who was severely depressed might snap and start trying to destroy everything – and I’ve been able to understand that since before I was on fluoxetine. I admit that I’ve been very lucky with regard to side-effects, but it’s odd that people won’t consider the mental illness the person was being treated for to be a cause. Presumably, they think that, if someone has been given medicine, that ought to be the end of their problems and no more complaining.
June 6th, 2010 - 16:36
Hitchens P really has got a brain though. If you read something like “The Abolition of Liberty” you can see a reasoned & thought through argument a lot of which I’d agree with. But that was a book, not his tabloid column, which is undeniably fucking shite.
I’ve often wondered how the same person can be the author of both.
June 6th, 2010 - 18:26
“But because it’s the Hitch, someone who’s mysteriously regarded as being intelligent, despite all the evidence to the contrary,”
‘The Hitch’ is Peter’s older brother, Christopher. Peter’s nickname is ‘Bonkers’. No really: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article1580004.ece
June 6th, 2010 - 20:16
2pallas: Thanks for the link. it is not hard to write about science and discuss the actual evidence, because science is all about evidence. It is a wonder to me how many people are so good at writing b.s. about science. Maybe there is some kind of academy where they teach you how to do that, it is quite a feat.
As I said in the post the suicide rate has fallen in most Western countries since the introduction of SSRIs in 1990 and the subsequent explosion in antidepressant sales.
The murder rate has likewise fallen. now I doubt this is because antidepressants prevent murder, but it makes it very unlikely that they cause it. Whereas the fact that a lot of killers were on antidepressants is not unusual given that a lot of everyone is on them nowadays.
June 6th, 2010 - 21:06
I’ve spotted something else in common with all those killers he listed – they’re all men! Now I am not about to start espousing some kind of blanket ban on men, as it would be ridiculous and far too easy to have a pointless, populist man ban. But if you look at the names, you’ll see that they are all men WHO HAVE THE LETTER ‘I’ IN THEIR NAMES!! Now THAT’S a link, people! How can that just be chance?!? All men who have the letter ‘I’ in their names should be permanently tracked by an old-fashioned village constable, so that he (and it will be a he, because he’s old-fashioned, remember, like things used to be in the days before crime) he can psychically divine if they’re about to go mental with a shotgun, by using his old-fashioned-policeman powers.
It is both interesting and worrying that, with so many such unhinged and otherwise inexplicable killings perpetrated by men with the letter ‘I’ in their names, the official world has been so slow to look into the matter.
June 7th, 2010 - 12:43
ha! genius!
June 7th, 2010 - 17:01
Bravo! I think we all need to have words with ‘Asquith’. Always had my doubts.
June 7th, 2010 - 17:03
And Celia, Neuroskeptic and Doxie. We’re fucked. They’re everywhere.
June 6th, 2010 - 22:22
Great post. Just come across you for the first time. Will be reading again.
What you analyse in such an amusingly (and entirely rightfully) indignant fashion is the very core of neo-conservatism. The ability to lay into an ill-defined ‘other’ as a way to reassure the readers that they – the normals – are every so right in everything they think and do is a classic and astonishingly effective tactic. One that I believe only works because of how appallingly affluent the audience of such writing happens to be, having had to do very little work to get into such a position relative to most of the 20th century (this applies on both side of the Atlantic).
The only very minor criticism I would have of your otherwise excellent and refreshingly precise writing/analysis, is your use of the term ‘prolls’. Whilst it works on the internet, and is right for this particular audience, I would hope that to broaden your appeal to the kinds of people who are less devoted to the ‘blogosphere’ that you would be able to pinpoint another term to characterise the wankers who employ such tactics. Note that such has been unforthcoming thusfar since the Bush era unleashed this particular wave of right-wing polemics. But it’s important we find one.
June 6th, 2010 - 22:24
@ Doxie: He doesn’t just extend the names of those who prefer diminutives, he shortens the names of those who themselves use the full forms (“Barry Obama”). While he is regularly guilty of faux-intellectualism, this particular phenomenon is mostly sheer unashamed rudeness.
June 7th, 2010 - 05:46
I use to think Hitch was just an over opinionated dinosaur conservative – not exactly short of those in my own community, if truth be told. But after following him for bit, I realised he’s just a Julie Birchill who prays. As for Porter – she ought to start a religion that involves worshipping one’s own ars — meet the kind of empathy-free self-centred careerist who touts itself as “aspirational”, when in reality, the gonk is just a uber-solipsist with a public profile. Come the revolution, I’d have ‘em both working on the checkout at a nationalised Tescos.
June 7th, 2010 - 08:18
I would not want to kill him, but an open hand slap would do wonders! His arrogance and lack of logic allow him to make the cognitive leaps that link anti-depressants to mass murder without the slightest shred of evidence, and in that you should almost pity him because he is obviously a man whose whole world view is one designed to torment him far worse than anyone else could.
I say almost.
June 7th, 2010 - 08:51
“he’s just a Julie Birchill who prays”
…except that Julie Burchill, having undergone some kind of spiritual awakening, is now also a Julie Burchill who prays. Although one would imagine that for both of them, it mainly consists of pointing out to God exactly where he went wrong and why it causes them both so much pain.
June 7th, 2010 - 09:01
This name lengthening thing suggests he is aping the tone of his mother when she used to tell him and Chris off as small boys:
“Christopher! Stop scribbling all over your brother’s copy of ‘Bunty’ in cunieform”
“Peteryoufuckingtwat stop poking pins into that golliwog”
June 7th, 2010 - 09:12
I’ve often thought that Hitchens espouses his bizarre views for either effect or because he is geniunely mentally ill. If it’s for effect then he really is a loathesome little shit, playing to the gallery like a child does for attention. If it’s the latter then he has my sympathy. I’ve often thought that people on the libertarian right must have some sort of mental illness to believe what they do. No-one could hold such selfish and sociopathic views and be considered to be well. They have this crazy worldview bordering on anarchy whereby they believe that in an “everyone for themselves” society all the bad bits, obviously introduced by the evil Left, will somehow disappear. How people, who evidently hate the idea of a cohesive society where eveyone is looking out for one and other instead of selfishly following their own agenda to the detriment of others, end up having a national voice beats the shit out of me.
As for his assertion that anti-depressants are to blame, what a load of shite. Ill considered, poorly researched shite at that. Still, I am the one who looks like an idiot for ever thinking the mainstream media was ever capable of publishing intellectually and scientifically rigorous work.
June 7th, 2010 - 09:55
Rick, there’s no way on Earth that Peter Hitchens is a libertarian. Quite the opposite – he’s as authoritarian, as socially conservative, as it’s possible to be without donning a swastika and growing an extremely silly moustache.
June 7th, 2010 - 10:12
It just goes to show what an astounding idiot the man is. He may just have well argued that the warning labels on anti-depressants are changed to say: “May cause nausea, diarrhea, drowsiness and bouts of homicidal rampages”
If it wasn’t such a serious subject and on such a public platform, he’d be funny … in a pathetic “oh look at the crazy man writing on the walls with his own shit” kind of way.
June 7th, 2010 - 10:35
I guess he’s not that much unlike his brother, who is probably disappointed that Derrick Bird wasn’t a Muslim.
I wish we could invent anti-bullshit medication.
June 7th, 2010 - 16:58
Well, you’re entirely right about this Anton, and pretty much anything Peter Hitchens says about science is embarrassingly stupid .
However, I can’t say that your blanket condemnation is entirely accurate, he actually wrote one of the most intelligent pieces about Saakashvilli’s attacks on the Ossetians, opposed the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq when it was decidedly unpopular to do so and often writes intelligently in favour of bringing back British rail and about civil liberties. (I say intelligently, not purely because I agree but because I think he does argue well: I actually do agree with him about gun laws but think going on about antidepressants is plain dumb).
I mention these things because not only are the political right often wrong on these issues but so are the political left, and frankly I do think that both the left and the right are increasingly insular and tend to avoid troublesome issues that may cause internal bickering whilst focusing increasingly on soft targets.
I find it especially curious that some people here seem to think that his brother is a mental giant compared to PH, given that Peter opposed the Iraq war when it was unfashionable to do so, whilst even now Christopher keeps ranting that he was right all along.
June 7th, 2010 - 22:56
A nice response.
June 12th, 2010 - 15:13
I don’t support most of the things that either Peter Hitchens or the Daily Mail believe but I do think that people who are anti-Hitchens often don’t bother to think about the arguments he makes and instead just have a knee-jerk reaction to the points he puts forward. Whether you agree with him or not, he does usually try and makes logical arguments. For example when he says that the amount of gun crime has increased since 1996 when the gun laws were toughened, this is clearly a correctly stated fact and not simply an opinion and people who don’t like Hitchens’ views on the subject should ponder and think about it logically rather than just dismissing it before they’ve even though about it properly. It is also a fact that the amount of social mobility in the UK has decreased since grammar schools were abolished in most places. Supporters of comprehensive schools should have a good, long think about why their flagship policy has had the reverse effect of the one they intended rather than simply ridiculing Peter Hitchens when he makes this point. Once again, the point about grammar schools is a fact, not an opinion. Of course, in an ideal world replacing grammar schools with comprehensive schools would have worked perfectly. But we don’t live in an ideal world unfortunately.
June 14th, 2010 - 08:36
I don’t think he tries to make logical arguments at all.
July 2nd, 2010 - 13:42
I am an admirer of most of P.Hitchens writing and thinking. Unfortunately he does tend to occasionally stray, sometimes doggedly and irrationally, into territiory that is clearly not his genre – and which is actually not of much interest to most people. But that is the exception rather than the rule as far as Hitchens P. is concerned. The vast majority of the social and political views he espouses and supports I fully concur with and which have been, still are, and will continue to be, proven right (in the face of trendy popular opinions) by the passage of time.
The diatribe of scorn by the lead article and by some of the postings here prove that the problem of ill-informed, small-mindedness and the famine of reason and logic is a blight affecting others who do not really look at the entire picture and cannot (or will not), therefore, put things into perspective.
But I agree. P.Hitchens comments about antidepressants were wrong in my opinion. But what he has said about fundamentally more important matters, and which constitutes about 90%+ of his written and published work, he is refreshingly, sometimes strikingly, correct (and controversial in a world drifting further and further from the shores of reason).
Everyone sometimes speaks or writes rubbish. But to those who cherry-pick P.Hitchens remarks about antidepressants and paint them as a portrait of the whole – you are misguided.
July 2nd, 2010 - 14:11
It’s not so much cherrypicking them as presenting them as crass stupidity, which they are.
August 19th, 2011 - 00:48
Sorry, but I disagree. Hitchens has since stated, and was very well aware at the time of writing that column, that correlation is not the same as causation. He didn’t say that it was in those words quoted above.
But as there has been a correlation between anti-depressants and recent murder sprees (yes sprees, not just your average murder) and suicides, he was merely suggesting that there ought to be some investigation into the psychological effects of anti-depressant medication. Your claim, quite rightly, that “he speculates, without any evidence”, but that is what he hopes to establish by calling for a more serious examination of anti-depressant medication. The efficacy of them determined in placebo test is highly questionable in its own right.
I’ve been on anti-depressants on two separate occasions, and nor did I have the urge to equip an Uzi and begin mowing people down (though I did become aggressive, agitated, and more suicidal), but I think Hitchens has a valid point. It sounds to me like you’re simply offended by his criticism of something you currently take.
August 22nd, 2011 - 07:45
No, that’s not it at all. But thanks for trying.
September 25th, 2011 - 19:04
I wonder how many other people landed here after googling ‘Peter Hitchens idiot’.
What I find most disturbing is how he readily admits to how much of a vindictive cunt he was at 15. While most people I know now who I knew at 15 have changed, deep down they’re still the same person. Which means deep down in Hitchens is an even bigger twat than the one we know. Scary.
May 13th, 2012 - 02:08
Really? My anti-depressants sent me to sleep. Mirtazapine. They are some of the most inert anti-depressants on NHS. They are also anti-anxiety and anti-emetic (no vomitting). They also help sleep. I came from a Youtube video full of comments who like Hitchens and think that he speaks sense…I have had to start a mantra “I do have faith in the human species, I do, I do” Anyone who likes to steamroller over other people’s rights is not a legend.
January 31st, 2013 - 18:04
Well fucking done. I absolutely hate this prick. It’s like you couldn’t even debate with this cunt before he starts espouses some kind of reactionary, badly-thought out, unjustifiable shit. This is a man who writes anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-secularisation, anti-evolution and god knows what other bullshit and then has the audacity to claim that all these Liberals and Leftists are somehow the ones at fault with ruining Britain. Fuck him. As soon as far-right cancer like him get exposed from society the better off we all will be.