Is Elizabeth Holmes Nuts?
If you are not familiar with Theranos then you were under a rock for a while. It was the company that was going to change how did bloodwork forever. Nope. You can watch any documentary on it from your subscription channel of choice to see the whole story. The amount of money that was poured into this company was ungodly. But it never was a real thing. Now she is under investigation for fraud and the woman who dressed like Steve Jobs is going to claim insanity:
This week, Judge Edward Davila of the US District Court for the Northern District of California granted federal prosecutors the ability to have Holmes examined by two experts — a psychologist and a psychiatrist — over two consecutive days and for no more than 14 hours combined. The ruling comes after Holmes’ defense team previously notified the government of intent to “introduce expert evidence relating to a mental disease or defect or any other mental condition of the defendant bearing on … the issue of guilt,” according to the filing.
Sorry, Elizabeth, every inventor or innovator is crazy so there is nothing special about you. ADD, Bipolar, and on and on. They all have it. Many of these people have committed suicide over the years. But here is the thing: they don’t lie the whole time. They have to have an idea to be an innovator. There needs to be substance. You didn’t have that.
They say that the only difference between insanity and genius is success. And, Elizabeth, you failed.
I’m reminded of a psychiatry case conference I attended in the 1970s when I was doing my internship in psychology at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center. The patient, whose particularly outrageous behaviors I forget, was interviewed by the resident and the outside examiner, and was asked to leave the room while the staff discussed his diagnosis. One of the other psychiatry residents addressed the senior faculty and asked, “What, exactly, are the DSM criteria for schmuck?”
You know who was really nuts?
All those venture capitalists who poured money into her empty black box.
There is a con around every corner.
All you have to do is want to believe.
Dave
(Standard disclaimers: Obviously I haven’t seen, examined Holmes; I don’t do capacity evals or NGRI opinions. But I watched the documentary on Amazon.) I’ve known a lot of manic patients over the years with a variety of outlandish ideas in a wide variety of areas, including religion, politics, and yes, technology. The difference is that the people around them can quickly and easily identify that the ideas are bunk and that the individual’s level of functioning is usually low– they just can’t “get it together.” In the case of Holmes: I’m sure they’ll find some high-dollar “expert” to say that she couldn’t help herself whether due to mood disturbance or ADHD but probably she’s just a narcissist. In other words, she believes her own hype. If a jury starts to buy psychiatric disturbance as an excuse, then it may be up to the prosecution to show enough documentation in corporate records that she knew (or should have known) that none of this crap worked but that she kept stringing people along anyway. So, yeah, she’s probably “nuts” but only in the often-infuriating way that people with severe personality disorders are. In practice, personality disorder alone usually isn’t used as an affirmative defense for criminality. (For example most people incarcerated after committing repeated acts of violence meet criteria for antisocial PD, but that doesn’t get them off the hook.) From a clinical perspective this is a very interesting case because of the sheer size of the scam. Side comment– a small number of huge tech successes, especially Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates who both dropped out of Harvard, have given rise to a kind of archetype of a college-dropout tech genius, a brilliant entrepreneur who’s too smart for whatever fancy school he/she was attending. In Holmes’ case, Stanford, which she left after her 1st year.