The ancient folk had a name for him. They called him Momus. He was the licensed critic who sprayed the gods with ridicule.
Is Paul Rodney McHugh a modern, flesh-and-blood Momus? A persistent faultfinder of the wannabe gods in psychiatry?
He hardly seems the type: He's not cranky; he doesn't go around preoccupied all the time. For someone who spends so much time among the depressed and insane, he's suspiciously happy.
Probably his reputation has less to do with the way he is than with his annihilating opinions on everything from doctor-assisted suicide (utterly wrong) to multiple personality disorder (it doesn't exist).
McHugh speak outs about the dubious practices -- and practitioners -- in the medical profession. People like Dr. Jack Kevorkian, whom McHugh regards as "insane" and "dangerous to others." Or Dr. Bruno Bettelheim, a renowned expert on children, who was "a habitual liar, thankless friend, vicious bully and brazen plagiarist. He died in 1990. Why not just forget him?"
But McHugh is always toughest on his own specialty, psychiatry, which he believes enjoys entirely too much credibility with the public and in the official world of courts and the law.
"Psychiatry," he writes, "is a rudimentary medical art." It is full of people who say things they can't prove about why human beings do what they do. Though all psychiatrists are medical doctors, psychiatry is largely bereft of the certainties that general medicine or chemistry or biology can claim. This is where it is most vulnerable to attack.
McHugh does not say most psychiatrists are irresponsible. He would admit many are.
He mentions an incident that occurred during the 1964 presidential campaign. It involved Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee, considered by some to be reckless on the issue of nuclear war, and a gambit by an obscure magazine titled Fact.
The editors of this journal sent questionnaires to psychiatrists all across the country asking them to assess Goldwater's mental state. Many, having never even met the senator, declared him unfit to be president.
"Scandalous and wrong," McHugh calls it.
This is the sort of thing that has always upset Paul McHugh, Henry Phipps Professor and director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins' School of Medicine.
