Michael Savage’s Parting Shot
July 29, 2008 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
As advertisers and networks have been dropping Michael Savage’s show in the wake of his infamous comments (here’s a list of 20 audio clips), here’s an email he sent to The Hook (Virginia):
The drug companies are very powerful and have worked very hard to silence any voice critical of the misdiagnosis of our children and the drugging of vulnerable minds. Sad the station manager is such an ignorant man.
Seems Savage is trying to portray himself as the misunderstood defender of so many poor misdiagnosed, “vulnerable [minded]” children and so offers up this defiant attempt parting shot. Guess a simple apology’s too hard.
Classic Wiener. He takes something that might be true (or a half truth) and tries to use to to justify his bias. Things are never black and white. Wiener nation folks seem to think they are. 99% of autistic kids are not brats, for instance. People who believe in Islam are not mostly all terrorists, etc etc.
Two words to describe Savage: bottom feeder.
he just makes me say “ick”…..
Thing is – you can’t make a kid ‘act’ Autistic so you can get him medicated….
The same freedoms that allow him to spew his uneducated venom allow advertisers to pick up their money and spend it elsewhere. God bless this country.
Would be interesting to make a list of every time he used the 99 percent figure.
Home Depot is on the board of Autism Speaks. Kind of a given they’d pull their ads…..!
Hopefully all the superstars have learned a valuable lesson.
Cheers
Why am i not surprised!
spinspeak.
He does not know the first thing about it.
He is back peddling to try and cover up his ignorance…Sounds like politics to me.
I listened to his explanation of how all this started with his thoughts about kids under the age of 2 being medicated for high (or low?) cholesterol – or something along those lines. He was questioning the use of medication with such a wide trend. He was an idiot for bringing up autism. Had he stayed on topic and talked about kids being over medicated, either in general, or in regard to cholesterol levels, fine. But he mixed up his thoughts with how he also happens to feel about autism. The first thoughts had nothing to do with the latter. He is grossly misinformed on a variety of levels and subjects and he just hurt himself even further by mixing up the topics.
I do have to say that I am extremely frustrated that my daughter’s neurologist (and also her pediatrician) is all too willing to write up any number of psychiatric drugs for the “anxiety” my daughter feels (it’s why she cries a lot he says) but come unglued when I mention the idea of giving her melatonin. So while I don’t agree with Savage in any way, I am concerned at the amount of control legal drugs seem to have over how we treat our bodies’ various ailments.
If I go into the doctor saying I feel depressed, they ask no questions but immediately prescribe medications. Nobody asks if I’m getting enough sleep, if I’m getting any exercise, if I’m eating right, taking vitamins or if I’m in counseling. They just send me (or my child) along with a Rx. Had Savage just stayed along those lines, he might have irked quite a few people still, but at least it would be a conversation worth having, questions worth asking. Calling kids (in general, but especially with a diagnosis attached) brats and parents negligent, or worse, money or benefit seeking is just unintelligent and mean.
Laura,
The same neurologist that put my son on Prozac also told us to put him on melatonin. The Prozac cranked him down from 11 to a solid 8-9 (makes all the difference in the world!) and the melatonin got his sleeping cycle much more stable.
I was worried that Prozac would turn him into a different kid, but all it did was take off the edge of the anxiety.
Michael Savage Do you think his name fits Savage- Not civilized, Ferorcious ; Brutal. I think this man is what his fater called him a Savage Idiot- A mentally deficient person. an imbecile; and my favorite a blockhead.
BS”D
I’m continuing from an earlier thread about Michael Savage, having defied the consensus that he is Public Enemy #1 of autistics.
OK. Savage is aptly named, he has a real vicious streak (also telling a prank caller to “get AIDS and die, you pig”), he does not know how to sanctify the G-d given gift of speech. His use of words like “brat,” “putz,” “idiot,” and “moron” is clearly offensive, and is far more disturbing than his autism denial. And his refusal to even say, “I’m sorry” for his language is probably the worst of all.
OK. I said it. But I still have a hard time getting worked up over Savage’s antics the way others, parents and autistics alike, have. I find the patronizing and exclusion of the most prominent autism advocacy groups toward autistics — symbolized by Autism Speaks and its childlike puzzle piece logo — to be far more offensive than Savage’s ignorance and verbal bullying. Few people find Savage credible on autism. Many people look to pro-cure researchers and advocacy organizations as being authorities on autism issues, even when cure-at-any-cost folks campaign to silence not only self-advocates, but also parents who are more pro-acceptance.
To me, the reaction to Savage is as if he had came out in favor of German psychiatry’s T4 “euthanasia” program as a “final solution” to the “autism question.” It is as if people were equating Savage’s autism denial with Holocaust denial. My point in my previous posts was that there are worse things in the world — for autistics — than autism denial, and I cited forced drugging as one major example. “Euthanasia,” once endorsed by the American Psychiatric Association in an official editorial in July 1942 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, is another — an editorial the APA has never officially repudiated.
Perhaps being Jewish and having a religious worldview which teaches me to strive to judge others favorably, even in seemingly difficult cases like this, makes me more inclined to look for the good in someone like Savage, even as he acts like an unrepentant verbal bully. To cite the Talmud, tractate Eruvin, “even the transgressors in Israel are as full of good deeds as the pomegranite is with seeds.” I hope others here can forgive me if I’ve been willing to give the guy some slack. Perhaps its AS naivete on my part. Or maybe it is a character trait we all need some of.
@Stephen Mendelsohn,
Point taken and appreciated. I think Savage could have evoked equal fervor by choosing a different conditions—-asthma, eating disorders, who knows what—-and ranting away. One could say, he was asking for it.
Funny how he blames it on the drug companies, when it is the autism community that has lobbied so hard to get his sponsors to drop him. He still seems to be confused about the fact that there is no “autism drug.” There was no reason to bring autism into a discussion about “over-medication” and certainly no excuse for the things he said. His ignorance would be laughable if there weren’t so many people out there taking him seriously.
BS”D
It’s curious to see asthma and “eating disorders” back to back. Asthma has no element of free will, no one would ever doubt asthma is an illness. Anorexia and bulimia are different; here there is an element of free will. Of course, women (and men, but mostly women) who starve themselves or binge and purge do so in a social context, including pressure to be thin, and deserve our compassion and not Savage-style scorn.
What Michael Savage played on (beyond the ranting and name-calling) is precisely this difference between literal (bodily) illness and metaphorical “illness” (troubling or troublesome behavior), and tried to assert that autism fell into the latter category at least 99% of the time. Many of us are skeptical about the ceaseless manufacture of new disease entities by the psychiatric profession (e.g., “oppositional defiant disorder”), which occurs far more frequently than the discovery of a new medical illness like HIV/AIDS. Because autism spectrum “disorders” are listed in the DSM-IV as if they were “mental illnesses,” it gives the Michael Savages of the world an opening to make these claims.
BS”D
Oops! I accidentally clicked the “Submit” button before I finished …
What we need to get across is that the autism spectrum is, at least putatively, organic, and not in the same category as anorexia or alcohol abuse, and that there are definite neurological differences here, such as sensory sensitivities, that clearly are not a matter of free will. Not that such organic differences require a cure …
@Stephen – good point, I think a lot of people don’t understand that autism is not an “illness” or “disease” but truly a neurological difference. No one can choose whether or not they have autism, and it can’t be “faked” either.
True and not true. The fact is that the range of problems now sorted under asperger and autism is so vast that it does not make sense to consider them as expressions of the same disorder.
Anyone doubting that the pharmaceutical industry does not work to expand it’s business (meaning broadening diagnostic criteria) needs to grow up. By the way, they are heavy funders of patient and relatives – mental health organizations. Show me one, 1, study that shows that this does not affect their policies.