IMPORTANT FACTS

1. According to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (DSM-IV) when its mental disorder descriptions “are employed for forensic purposes, there are significant risks that diagnostic information will be misused and misunderstood.”

2. Psychiatry, using the same DSM, has warped the justice system to protect criminals instead of protecting society from criminals.The APA and psychiatric associations in other countries stand by and do nothing.

3. A survey conducted on the Australian judiciary about their views of “expert” witnesses found widespread lack of confidence in psychiatry as a forensic tool.

4. According to a 1988 paper written by a psychologist, “studies show that professional clinicians do not in fact make more accurate clinical judgments than lay persons.”

CHAPTER TWO The Science of Fraud

In a 1962 article in the Northwestern Law Review, psychiatrist Alfred Baur cited a case where his hospital received a patient for a three-month observation before he was to go on trial. Baur and two colleagues concluded that he had “no mental disorder.” The court, however, appointed two private psychiatrists to give their expert opinions. One announced that the patient was a paranoid schizophrenic; the other said he was merely in a paranoid state. Come the trial, the hospital psychiatrists testified that the patient was not insane, while the two court-appointed psychiatrists insisted that he was.

The final irony in this ludicrous situation was, as Baur reported, “The jury thereupon found the man ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’ and ‘still insane’ and then committed him to the hospital which had just found him without mental disorder.”

In 1994, an amazed world watched two California juries become hopelessly deadlocked in the trials of Erik and Lyle Menendez, adult brothers who had brutally murdered their parents in the family’s $4 million home. A team of psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists were hired to build their defense. Utah psychologist Ann Tyler testified that the brothers suffered from “learned helplessness” as a result of intense, repeated abuse. Another psychologist, John Wilson, claimed the boys had “post-traumatic stress disorder.”

One of the jurors remarked, “I don’t think the general public thinks the jury is any more than a bunch of idiots.” So what did manage to paralyze the two sets of twelve men and women? It was the fact that no two psychiatrists could agree on the boys’ mental diagnosis and the psychiatric notion that criminality is excusable.

After two trials, the brothers were convicted. But questions continued about the role of psychiatrists and psychologists in our courts. An essay on the case by Margaret Carlson, published in TIME magazine, said: “Victimology has turned to be the winning tactic of our era. In the Menendez case, the law has been so stretched that an ‘unreasonable’ belief that one is in danger of serious harm — one no sane person would harbor—can be sufficient grounds for self-defense. How did we go from a society that dis- tinguished right from wrong to one that under- stands all and punishes nothing?”

The answer lies in the goal for psychiatry delineated by C. Brock Chisholm, co-founder of the World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH)—that therapy be aimed at eliminating the concept of right and wrong—and, bolstering this, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and the mental disorders section of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10).

“Unlike medical diagnoses that convey a probable cause, appropriate treatment and likely prognosis, the disorders listed in DSM-IV [and ICD- 10] are terms arrived at through peer consensus”—a vote by APA committee members—and designed largely for billing purposes, reports Canadian psychologist, Dr. Tana Dineen. In other words, there is no objective science to it.

As Dr. Margaret Hagen points out: “… Our legal system has been told that clinical psychology is a scientificdiscipline, that its theories and methodology are those of a mature science, and our legal system has believed it. Given the deplorable state of the ‘science’ of clinical psychology, that is truly unbelievable.”

In a survey conducted on the Australian judiciary about their views of “expert” witnesses, Dr. Ian Freckelton, one of the nation’s leading authorities on the medico-legal maze, found a widespread crisis of confidence in psychiatry as a
forensic tool. Judges “think it’s a soft science,” he said, noting the DSM has strict caveats against its use in court.

According to the DSM-IV, itself, “When the DSM-IV categories, criteria, and textual descriptions are employed for forensic purposes, there are significant risks that diagnostic information will be misused and misunderstood.” And it is “not sufficient to establish the existence for legal purposes of a ‘mental disorder,’ ‘mental disability,’ or ‘mental defect,’” in relation to competency, criminal responsibility or disability.

Studies show that psychiatrists and psychologists do not make more accurate clinical judgments than laypersons.Consider the case of Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, the boss of a New York crime family, convicted of racketeering and murder conspiracy. Feigning mental illness for more than 30 years, whenever he went to trial, the mobster hired psychiatrists who testified that he suffered from “paranoid schizophrenia, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.” In 2003, Gigante admitted he was a fake and had knowingly—and easily—misled the highest paid psychiatrists for three decades.

When imagined “mental disorders” absolve the guilty of their crimes through an insanity defense (e.g., “pyromania disorder” for arson; “pedophilia disorder” for child molestation), and wholly fictitious conditions are created to convict the innocent (e.g., feeding imaginary recollections of child molestation to patients who then accuse their parents and others under the fabricated “repressed memory” syndrome), society is truly in trouble. And when criminals are acquitted because psychiatrists swear they are insane, only to be sent to psychiatric institutions where their violent madness will become aggravated by drugs, then the totalitarian brave new world—free of moral restraint as envisioned by WFMH co-founders Drs. Rees and Chisholm— has been realized.

As long ago as 1884, the New York Court of Appeals stated that “twelve jurors of common sense and common experience” would do better on their own than with the help of the hired experts, “whose opinions cannot fail to be warped by a desire to promote the cause in which they are enlisted.” Since then there has been the long and well-established tradition of psychiatrists and psychologists selling themselves for a sizeable profit to the point where “the pursuit of truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” has given way to reams of meaningless data, fearful elaborate speculation and fantastic conjecture. Courts resound with elaborate, systemized, jargon-filled, serious-sounding deceptions that fully deserve the contemptuous label used by trial lawyers themselves: “junk science.”

Yet during trials, in sentencing, in probation hearings, psychiatrists are still called upon for their opinions. And, sadly, these opinions are considered.

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