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Lessons from Mental Retardation

I think I have given a general overview of what the vibe was like for me when I first started my work at the Lubbock State School.  I did this job on and off for over a year. In hindsight its my favorite job I have ever held outside of scientific research.  It was always exciting, and I could fill a book with stories about it.  Maybe if someday I actually accomplish something worthwhile I will write a memoir.

The important thing for now though is what I learned from these experiences.

At the time I began my work at the Lubbock State School I was a charismatic Christian.

This caused me to hold certain doctrinal assumptions.

1.) One of which is that there was a soul that was somehow separate from the body, and therefore immune to decay and eternal.

2.) Another assumption was that demons possessed people and caused them to do horrible things.

3.)I also believed prayer with the laying on of hands could cure people of diseases.

For this entry at least I will focus on these three assumptions.

Assumption 1: Soul is not part of the body

My work at the state school did not fundamentally eradicate this erroneous belief for me. But it did shake it up, it did help me in great part to study first psychology and then neuroscience. 

The thing about my work at the state school is that it made me have to deal with many real implications of what is called in academic circles “The mind body problem.”

The mind body problem is in a nutshell the question about whether or not we have a soul that is not physical in nature. I’m of the school of thought that the soul is the brain and its neurons and molecules.

We had one client who I will call Mr. Soft.  Mr. Soft suffered from a condition called Prader-Willie, which is a genetic disorder that causes among other things mental retardation.

Prader-Willie also causes people not be aware when they are satisfied with the amount of food they have eaten.

Prader-Willie is caused by the lack of 7 genes on chromosome 15. This lack could be caused by a failure to express or a total absence of these genes.

Interestingly though people with Prader-Willie suffer from cognitive impairment they are master puzzle solvers, and Mr. Soft could kick my ass every time on Connect 4, which caused me to have an existentialist crisis of sorts.

The theory about Prader-Willie patients and their insatiable appetite is that chromosome 15  abnormalities have been shown to disturb the normal functioning of the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is a deep brain structure which is known to regulate basic functions like hunger.  But no specific anatomical abnormality has yet been found. I speculate that the defect is molecular, since transcription need only be interrupted for a malfunction.  We’ll leave all that for another day.

Mr. Soft could not stop himself from eating. This is the main point for my purposes.

I think Charismatics officially reject the catholic idea that gluttony is a sin but, de facto in the number of Charismatic Christian Diet books one can find at any Christian book store  they are concerned about it.

Mr. Soft literally had to be physically restrained from eating.

Once he was taken on a trip with several other clients to a drive through restaurant. This is something unwise done regularly by the staff. But its common enough, you take several clients to a restaurant drive through, you let some of them order food and you order some for yourself and then you don’t have to brown bag it.  If you want to judge the staff, I say until you have cleaned a mile of human feces in their moccasins you are not fit to judge.

But for Mr. Soft this was too much. He ran out of the van, ran into the restaurant and tried to order food. He was not allowed to have this kind of fattening food.

When staff came in after him, he knew they would try to remove him. So he took off all his clothes, and laid down. He was simply too heavy to be picked up.

I had to be called out from work.  He was naked in a public place laying on the floor. 

I got all the staff to leave us alone and I got him up with a promise of a pickle and a diet coke later. All together containing less than 10 calories. He would do anything for food, you just had to offer him food that was not harmful.

This definitely shook up my ideas about a moral agent immortal soul which was somehow separate from the body. Mr. Soft was, like all of us, it seems a prisoner of his physiology and genetics.

Another client I’ll call Spicy Johnny was a sexual predator. This client was so fun, and so nice, that to think of him as one is accustomed to thinking of a child molester is just not correct.  Spicy Johnny had an IQ of less than 60. 

Charismatic Christians definitely think child molestation is a sin, and I definitely agree that its wrong.

But should  not have Spicy Johnny’s immortal soul which acts a moral agent, and was made in the image of God, be held responsible for all eternity for his sexually predatory behaviors.

I think scripturally he was damned to the fire.  This is all I knew at the time.

And it seemed wrong to me.

It seemed that Spicy Johnny could not help himself. He had all the hormonal impulses of a normal adult male, with none of the cognitive power to practice self restraint .

This for me definitely shook up the idea of a non-physical soul that was a moral agent and made in the image of God.