Everyone needs his hobbies.  Even liberals do.  But this one is exceptional, even by twisted liberal standards.  It involves having a bunch of meat hooks stabbed into your body and then being hung from them.

NPR gave this perversion some free air time yesterday, and I thought I'd follow suit – not to promote this form of self-mutilation, but to expose the latest cancerous mutation of left-wing culture.

It's called "Body Suspension," and believe me when I say I chose one of the tamer pictures out there to illustrate this practice.  While nothing compares to the Holocaust, it has a real Holocausty vibe.

Kirsten Janusewski is lying on her back on a massage table, inside a windowless warehouse in Easton, Pennsylvania.  She's wearing a bra and bike shorts, and she has dots of black marker all over her body – on her collarbones, her ribs, her thighs, her kneecaps, and her shins.

Five people are standing around her with rubber gloves and surgical face masks on.  Each one of them is holding a large, sharp metal hook, about the size of a coat hanger.

Janusewski breathes in deeply, and, as she exhales, they drive the hooks through her skin.  This is why she came here – to hang from the ceiling by her skin, essentially.

"People run because it's an adrenalin rush; it releases those good feelings," she says.  "Suspension does the same kind of thing.  It's all those same kind of natural drugs that happen with it."

Sometimes Janusewski suspends as a celebration of something good going on in her life.  But, this time around, she is suspending because things have been hard for her lately.

"Suspension definitely helps start that movement, more of a positive mental kind of attitude.  It helps clear all those negative emotions that I have going on."

The room is tense as the rig is raised slowly, pulling the hooks and stretching Kirsten's skin.  She hangs there for about 15 minutes.  Jeremy gently swings her the way a parent would a child on a swing set.

She asks to come back down, and, the moment her body hits the table, she begins to cry.

"Thank you guys very much," she says as the team puts Band-Aids over the hook wounds.  "Thank you for making me cry, too.  I needed it."

This can be viewed as the same kind of mental illness as "sex change" surgery, a form of self-mutilation meant to make the victim feel better.  It's even a distant cousin of tattooing, the original form of self-mutilation.  (I never understood why, if someone really, really liked a cartoon, he wouldn't keep it on a piece of paper rather than on his forearm.)

Remember in the "old days," when people who were fundamentally unhappy with themselves or their lives used to go to psychologists to talk out their problems or, in extreme cases, get  medicated?

That's so passé now!

Now fundamental unhappiness with the self is "treated" with pain and mutilation.

How long before the American Psychiatric Association calls this an approvable treatment for depression?  How long before Medicare is forced to pay for such things?  How long before the military is forced to pay for such torture and to admit such mentally ill people into its ranks?  And how long before children are taught, in school, that cutting themselves can be a good thing if makes them feel better?

It's the next iteration of the dysfunctional liberal culture, and it's coming.

Ed Straker is the senior writer at Newsmachete.com.