While he works on launching a U.S. senatorial run in Massachusetts, Fox’s “Medical A-Team” psychiatrist, Keith Ablow, has his platform on the “fair and balanced” network to promote his candidacy. So this morning, when he visited Fox & Friends to discuss the psychological scars that might affect Ethan, the Alabama kindergartner just rescued after being held hostage for nearly a week, Ablow gratuitously attacked those who think this is another example of the need for stricter gun regulations and suggested they are so dedicated to an anti-gun agenda that they’d rather people get shot by the mentally ill than institutionalize them.
I’ve written many times about what a crackpot Ablow is and his propensity for diagnosing people without benefit of an examination. In this case, he diagnosed Ethan as more or less doomed to mental illness - without knowing much more than his first name. Reacting to a report that the boy has been “laughing, joking, playing and eating” after being reunited with his mother, Ablow rendered his opinion: These are “also the things that five- or six-year-olds do when they’re desperately trying to maintain some semblance of normality… I can tell you that the effort to maintain that sense of normality in and of itself has set the stage for all kinds of trouble down the road. So, as sad as it is, Ethan isn’t OK. He’s at tremendous risk for depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, alcohol and drug abuse later in life. Fractured relationships. All manner of disabilities from psychological problems.”
Nobody challenged Ablow’s “evaluation.” Instead, Steve Doocy opened the door for Ablow to opine on policy by asking if maybe “somebody should have connected some dots” about the state of the abductor’s mental health.
Ablow replied:
Gee, ya think? And there’ll be people, by the way, who say this is an argument for more gun control. Those people are reprehensible. Because the bottom line is, this guy had a hearing for medicine coming up. You mean to say the court couldn’t have connected the dots between that and the fact that his neighbors said that he had threatened kids’ lives? And that he had beaten a dog to death with a pipe and said, ‘We are holding you in the psychiatric unit for evaluation against your will.’ Really?
Gretchen Carlson prodded for more by “asking” why they don’t do that.
With unintentional hilarity, Ablow said it’s because it takes “work” and “It takes not pontificating and trying to make political points by saying we’re gonna take everybody’s guns! …Obvious people who need help aren’t given that help when we could deliver it – because we have the expertise – but we’re not willing to allocate resources, partly out of stigma, and partly out of the fact that people would rather try to pander to certain voting blocs by saying it’s all about guns. Which it isn’t.
Doocy closed by validating the hypothesis: “It didn’t have to happen.”
