…………………………………………A Case Review

“Anosognosia is exactly what I think he had. I believe that’s what my son had. … he lost his capacity to understand his illness. He went off his meds… and never took them again. He ultimately chose to take his life rather than take medication. – said a Mother of her son diagnosed with Anosognosia.

Some people with Strokes, Brain tumors suffer from the same lack of insight – says the clinician. Russell Weston came to Washington DC to save the world from cannibals and killed two police officers while in this delusional state.

Russell Weston – The cannibals, … I have control of the Ruby satellite system and they are being criminally prosecuted for murdering cannibalism. Then they say: Well, the Ruby Time Reverse system means that they are not permanently dead, so they cannot be criminally prosecuted for a murder.

  • _ How about you being prosecuted and having control of the time sweep…
  • _ Well, that’s not going to do anything…
  • _ Will that make them come alive by your choice.
  • _ Yes, I can do that.
  • _ But you wouldn’t?
  • _ I usually do not know.
  • _ If AG and Berry recommended an insanity defense, would you go along with it?
  • _ No
  • _ Why not?
  • _ That is not consequential to my position.
  • _ First of all, do you perceive yourself as being mentally ill?
  • _ No.
  • _ Alright. Is that the primary reason that you would reject an insanity defense?
  • _ That’s correct, yes.”

Russell Eugene Weston Jr. believed to have invented for NASA a so-called Ruby Satellite System. Being in orbit, it had the ability to reverse time flow according to him. Weston entered the US Capitol Building on July 24, 1998 and killed by gunshots police officers Jacob J. Chestnut and John M. Gibson in his way to the Senate quarters. The two police officers were in his mind cannibals, and he had the belief that in the senate quarters was hidden a “great safe of the United States Senate” which contained the Ruby Satellite System’s controls. Weston was attempting to access that safe to save America from being destroyed by cannibals and a disease he called “Black Heva.”

Weston believed Chestnut and Gibson weren’t actually dead permanently. The Ruby Satellite System that he invented after attending the “World Summit for Time Reverse Technology” could reverse time flow and bring them back to life by using a process he called the time reverse sweep, which in his word “washes time in reverse”.

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This chronicle exposes the entire drama of our Medical Sciences of the Mind. From the ordinarily held perspective, a single nosological expression receives a name and becomes a qualified disease, in this case Anosognosia. To the point that a mother had become persuaded under this view that the true diagnosis of her son’s disease who had stopped taking his prescribed medication is Anosognosia, cause of his ultimate death by suicide as she believes.

Anosognosia is declared to be an apparent neurological condition in which insight in one’s own heath condition is lost, per the chosen Greek word for the presumed disease. In fact, the root cause of this nosological expression or symptom is acknowledged unknown and to this day inexplicable in Allopathic medicine. It is said to be tightly associated with Alzheimer’s, Schizophrenia and Bipolar disorder as psychiatric impairments.

The main factor that motivates the definition of Anosognosia as a neurological condition is the lack of self-awareness that manifests in known neurological shocks resulting from catastrophic cortical accidents by strokes, lesions or significant metabolic deficits, such as those in the frontal or frontotemporal cortex in the right hemisphere. Neglect syndrome is another neurologic condition where Anosognosia-like behavior is present.

From a pure psychiatric and psychological vantage, all psychotic disorders in fact present with anosognosia. Once we remove some of the incongruent categorizations of mental disorders, for instance what is known as mood disorders in contrast to other neurodivergent illnesses, one becomes able to seize psychosis in its broadest and most authentic dimensions. In particular, the axis positioning neuroses and psychoses becomes central to any legitimate broad categorization in psychopathology, and in this context anosognosia as inability for insight in one’s own ailing health condition plays a crucial role in the taxonomic definitions.

Russell Preston’s story unequivocally shows that he was at a minimum delusional. In fact, he was seriously hallucinating. His intricate story of cannibalism, time reversal, de facto execution of police officers who he took for dangerous cannibals, his presumed ability to reverse time and to “wash it” in reverse in order to bring the dead back to life if he wanted to,  his perception that they are not dead after having summarily executed them, is the story of an intricate hallucination thread.

By the same token, one ought to recognize that the vector galvanizing his mind throughout his hallucinatory journey was one geared to conflict,  aggression or antagonism, and deconstruction of the elements of reality. From the psychophysics perspective of Mind, this vector incarnates a specific phenomal norm or typology which is Paradox. There is an entire psychophysical layer of Mind that is animated by this ontological type whose physical nature is accessible through a strict physical study of Mind. It is rather interesting that his Mind took to revert a physical dimension of reality, which is Time, a controversial subject long debated in theoretical physics.

A psychoanalytic approach to the case will cast that Weston’s anosognosia is a defense mechanism aimed at preserving him from the pain of a circumstance arising from genuine elements of the reality of his life. That is probably true as well and, if so, only adds to the identification of an exacerbation of the Paradoxical psychophysical layer of his Mind. This layer is in fact the owner of instinctual pain. We are all familiar with the negation reaction when given bad or catastrophic news about a person or a circumstance in life which by all means we wish it had not occurred. We utter the characteristic words “Oh, No!” and immediately represent for ourselves that the news is NOT true. We may go so far as to ask the person breaking the news to “please tell us that is NOT true.”

It is not the Conscious self that instigates those kinds of reactions but the Unconscious paradoxical layer of Mind. It characteristically represents and projects an antithetic situation of relief (contrary to the pain) while instantiating a blockage of the instinct of pain. This is the beginning of lies, anxiety, distress, dread, etc. Whenever the activity of this Layer becomes paroxysmal or overly exacerbated, it drowns the Conscious self in dystopic hallucinatory projections. The central element of Weston’s hallucinations was a dystopic world populated with “cannibals” everywhere which needed him to take action for their elimination. He saw a world of “Russian” (or enemy) cannibals, “Police officer cannibals” and “alien cannibals”, and a plague that in his mind was characteristically black in its ethnic connotations and called it “Black Heva”, and which he needed to protect himself and America from.

From both a categorical/taxonomic and diagnostic point of view, the true essence of his impairment had less to do with Schizophrenia or Bipolar Disorder or Alzheimer or Huntington disease than it did with Sadism, Masochism, Sadomasochism, or even Frotteuristic Disorder, because it shares with them the same psychophysical root and dynamic mentation partitions. Anosognosia is simply a nosological common denominator to all psychoses when they are properly redimensioned etiologically.

Weston was diagnosed with “paranoid schizophrenia” six years before the shooting occurred at the Capitol. Then age 42, he had been mentally ill for 2 decades and had previously spent involuntarily 53 days in a psychiatric hospital after he had threatened a Montana resident. He was unfortunately discharged after he tested to represent no danger to himself or others. The consequence of misdiagnosis here is the resulting tragic death of two police officers and a wounded third. From what publicly transpired of his condition and psychiatric interactions, and from an exacting etiological vantage with psychophysics, Weston was neither paranoid nor schizophrenic, nor the both.

The remarks from the Judge at the end of the video clip in relation to the limits of individual responsibility cannot be overstated. While the instance of personal individual responsibility can never be totally muted, because at the end it is the self that takes action, social responsibility, which represents a higher instance than the individual, dictates an obligation for the institutions of Science, in this case Medical Science, to facilitate but not block scientific progress aiming at benefitting members of the society at large. They do so by embracing openness and multidisciplinary insights to long-last intractable problems facing the collective. Quite frankly, that has yet to be seen in psychiatric medicine. It is also important for professionals in psychiatry and neuroscience to realize that these fields will need to be augmented with the powerful capacities of physical science in order to meet the curative challenges of public mental health and the pressing demand for precision psychiatric medicine worldwide after about 200 long years in the making.

Joseph J. Jean-Claude