A man has come forward to allege that he and Kevin Spacey engaged in a sexual relationship when he was 14 and the actor was 24, but Spacey denies the claims. The news comes amid reports that the star has inappropriately harassed younger men throughout his career.
Since the news broke, production of the 58-year-old star’s Netflix series House of Cards has been suspended while he seeks treatment.
It’s a similar story with Harvey Weinstein, who reportedly fled the United States amid charges of decades of sexually predatory behavior in Hollywood in order to “seek treatment”.
What does it mean to “seek treatment”? Are we to believe that such behavior, when it happens, is like a cold, the flu or cancer? That when you obtain treatment for it, it will go away, as if the “illness” of the behavior has nothing whatsoever to do with anything conscious or deliberate on the part of the person?
If only the human psyche were that simple.
If you think about it, it doesn’t make sense on its own terms. If Spacey suffers from an illness which only “treatment” will resolve — in between filming seasons of House of Cards — then why on earth would he not have obtained such treatment decades ago? Ditto for Harvey Weinstein.
A lot of people are ignorant and (to be fair) misled on the subject by less objective members of the psychiatric industry. But I’m hard-pressed to find anyone — and I mean anyone inside or outside of the mental health profession — who actually and honestly thinks (with self-conscious virtue-signaling PC blinders off) that Harvey Weinstein or Kevin Spacey are getting anything like “treatment”.
What they’re getting is a dose of reality. And of getting exposed. Each of them is paying the price for transgressions, errors, lapses or even downright predatory behavior. It’s behavior they could count on others ignoring or forgetting, at least until now. You’re only as sick as your secrets. Or the unwillingness of significant others around you to call a spade a spade.
It’s less an issue of psychology than it is an issue of accountability. Weinstein, Spacey and others like them faced little or no accountability for their behaviors in the past. Now they do. They go through the motions of pretending it’s something like a medical disease and rush into “treatment” as if following the advice of an attorney or a p.r. agent was actually the remedy for whatever makes them do what they do.
Now that’s insanity.
In a psychological-behavioral context, “treatment” does not mean making it appear to others that you’ve changed. True change only comes when you transform yourself solely for yourself, because you realize that you’re the only one that you’re with — and answer to — 24 hours a day.
The highly naive and foolish might applaud these troubled and (certainly in the case of Weinstein) depraved and predatory individuals for “seeking treatment” only when the opinion of others compels them to do so. But what separates the men from the boys is recognizing that you owe healthy and rational living to yourself most of all. You “seek help” long before it gets to this point, because you realize it’s for your own sake that you’ve got to stop what you’re doing.
Quite honestly, predatory behavior is the impulse of a sociopathic criminal personality, not someone suffering from what’s commonly understood as mental disorder. Just because something is unhealthy and insane does not automatically place it outside the boundaries of moral judgment. It’s politically incorrect to say so, but any semi-rational person can grasp it’s true.
Get real. Life is not Hollywood. If treatment could really help these men, they would have sought it out a long, long time ago.
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