Corruption and OCD

Is corruption a serious mental illness requiring psychiatric or psychotherapeutic intervention?

Is it the ultimate addiction one could have when appointed or elected in public office? Is taxpayer’s money a corrupt politician’s best antidepressant?  Or have they lost their ability to situate themselves in normal perception that they could no longer distinguish the difference between self-aggrandizement, private gain and public service?  Should we require them to undergo a regular psychiatric test to determine their mental and psychological health? Or are they simply too insane, the corrupt, to be reformed?

Quite recently some case researches in governance, psychiatry, psychology, political science and corruption studies suggests that corrupt public officers might be suffering from OCD or obsessive-compulsive psychiatric disorder. It means that if one is engaged in a ritual routine of self-aggrandizement or if one is habitually involved in a gluttonous act of accumulating or pilfering public wealth then he or she must be mentally imbalance.  

OCD according to the International OCD Foundation is a brain and mental disorder characterized by repetitive behaviors of compulsion and obsession which includes, in this article, extreme hoarding and pre-occupation of sexual, violent and religious thoughts.

OCD patients are potentially psychotic and they are excessively, in their private and public lives meticulous, perfectionistic and absorbed according to GE Berrios, a psychiatrist. They also have this extreme sense of responsibility or sense of rightness and they tend to overvalue their fears and ideas. OCD patients are also delusional and fixated according to the British Journal of Psychiatry.

After having dealt with corruption cases in Africa, Farida Waziri, Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission in Nigeria argued that OCD patients are psychologically unfit for government service and suggested that as a matter of public policy and for good governance, transparency and accountability, politicians must undergo psychiatric test ahead of elections. Civil servants should have an annual psychiatric evaluation to test their level of mental and psychological suitability for public office. In her view, OCD patients are reckless and neurotic and thus should not be entrusted with the affairs and wealth of the state. Doing so would endanger the lives and futures of many. 

Just try to imagine a mayor, a governor, a treasurer, an administrator or a president having an acute OCD syndrome and issuing executive orders and memos or signing checks covering millions or billions of pesos. They would certainly; the kleptocrats they are and like a venomous snake swallow roughly around forty percent to fifty percent of a project budget or at least around a quarter or more of the national or local government budget.  For them to succeed, petty or grand corruption need to be systemic and well, of course, organize. This criminal enterprise can go beyond what we could imagine especially when everyone, I mean literally, is on the take. Corruption is so easy to do in a system where, to borrow the words of Heinzpeter Znoj, it becomes the rule rather than the exception.

A mentally insane person would be in an unstoppable cash chase and would be willing to commit bribery, extortion, embezzlement, cronyism, nepotism, patronage, back room deals and graft to nurture or perhaps manage their compulsive-obsessive disorder. If these kleptocrats had been running the affairs of the state say in the last 30 years my guess is that they might have pilfered around two to three billion pesos or more. Imagine that! 

Their unreasonable excessiveness encourages political corruption and the negative effects to a community or a society or a civilizations future is quite many to mention. It impedes the rule of law, distorts political development and governance, undermines government legitimacy, marginalizes the poor and sustains patronage, cynicism, the misuse of government power for private interest, etc. The global watchdog Transparency International’s latest corruption index descriptively ranked the Philippines as “highly corrupt”. Legal and structural reforms might not be enough to combat corruption in the Philippines.

So how or when would we know if a government official or a civil servant has OCD?

Well we could use these symptoms listed by the American Psychiatric Association and the Journal of British Psychology: compulsive hoarding (houses, cars, business, etc.), sexually aggressive nature, repetitive, bipolar, excessively over-checking, praying excessively or engaging in rituals driven by religious fear, they are out of control and riddled with anxiety, they are an excessive gambler, are overeating and highly ritualistic.

I would like to see the day when leaderships and system integrates psychiatric test, psychology, yoga and meditation for government officials or bio-psychology as part of the governments’ short and long-term anti-corruption strategy and program.

I think corruption is a mental and an emotional disorder. It is a psycho-somatic disease. The Queen’s eternal songwriter and rock god Freddie Mercury song “Too much love will kill you” might be significant here and I will quote some of the song lyrics and partly modified it in context. 

Corruption is like a person madly, possessively and obsessively in love. It is a “tangled state of mind.” If they, the corrupt, “can’t make up that silly mind” they, certainly, are “headed for disaster and could become the victim of their crime.” “The pain could make them crazy and too much love could kill them every time.”

Again, Mercury and this writer would like to remind everyone that, like love, corruption could “drain the power that’s in you and you won’t understand why.” “You’d give your life, you’d sell your soul, It’ll make your life a lie…but here it comes again too much love will kill you every time.” Aristotle and Cicero might be right when they said that the corrupt are “utterly broken” and that “disasters are warnings; there’s too much corrupt in the world.”