Although suicide is legal, failed suicide or communicating the intention to commit suicide is not. Each is a violation of mental health laws, punished by coercions called “hospitalization” and “treatment.” In my recent book, Suicide Prohibition: The Shame of Medicine (Syracuse University Press), I examine this modern phenomenon and illustrate it with many examples. Here I add a few more typical vignettes.

On February 11 KTLA TV in Los Angeles reported that little Jack Dorman, a 6-year-old child in San Pedro, California, “was pulled out of his elementary school classroom after he sketched a drawing of zombies and stick figures and wrote that he wanted to die.” Against the express wishes of his mother, he was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital. Why? Because in the eyes of the mental health establishment and the school system, he was, prima facie, guilty of the thought crime of “dangerousness to self.”

Jack’s father, a soldier, was being deployed to Iraq. His mother, Syndi, said her son “was simply upset” because he missed his father and that the school’s treatment of her son “was right up there with my worst nightmare.”

Before taking Jack to the insane asylum by ambulance, the school authorities notified Mrs. Dorman of their decision. She objected, according to the television report, explaining that he “suffers from separation anxiety and has seen a therapist in the past. On the day he drew the disturbing picture, he was upset that he couldn’t stay home with his family [and she added] that she would immediately take her son to see his own therapist.”

Nevertheless school officials “called a Los Angeles County psychiatric mobile response team. They determined Jack needed to be committed to a 72-hour psychiatric hold at a local hospital. . . . Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Ramon Cortines released a statement, saying, ‘When any student indicates a desire to take his or her own life, the LAUSD is required to follow strict protocols to ensure the safety of the student. . . . The safety of LAUSD students is paramount. We did the right thing here.’”

This is medical sadism masquerading as suicide prevention. Worse, it is educational entrapment masquerading as compassionate concern for “kids.” From kindergarten on American children are routinely given crayons and encouraged to “express themselves.” Often their drawings are interpreted as if they were the productions of potentially dangerous persons providing “psychiatric insights” into their “minds.” Thus children are diagnosed as mentally ill, ejected from school, incarcerated in insane asylums, and drugged. They as well as their parents are victims of legal-psychiatric entrapment, an outcome due in part to the fact that many Americans—parents especially—have eagerly entrapped themselves in the psychiatric protection racket.

After 48 hours, little Jack was allowed to go home. Not surprisingly, he now has a bona fide mental illness, “school phobia”: “He’s afraid they are going to take him away again,” says his mother.

When Suicide Prohibition Promotes Suicide

Prohibitions tend to promote the very things prohibitionists ostensibly seek to prevent. Suicide prohibition is no exception. When the result is unqualified evil, as it often is, we insist on misinterpreting the causal sequence, as the following story illustrates.

In February the Everly Funeral Homes in Fairfax, Virginia, placed the following notice on its website: “Mr. Nicholas L. ‘Nick’ Stuban, age 15, of Fairfax, VA, passed away on January 20, 2011. . . . In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations in Nick’s memory to any organization dealing with Teen Depression and Suicide Prevention.”

Nick Stuban was a popular football player at W. T. Woodson High School in Fairfax County. He was a good student, well behaved, and well liked by teachers. He did not “pass away.” He killed himself. Why? Because of a set of events set in motion by punishment for buying a capsule of a legal substance, JWH-018, a synthetic compound with marijuana-like properties.

On November 3, 2010, Nick was suspended from school. For almost three months he was banned from attending weekly Boy Scout meetings, driver’s education sessions, and all sports events. “He felt stigmatized and grew isolated. . . . [T]he teen rumor mill produced exaggerated versions of why he’d been suspended. Some friendships slipped away. His sense of accumulating unfairness rose,” one news report stated. This was not the only trauma Nick had to cope with. His mother, disabled by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, was dependent on a mechanical ventilator and cared for by her husband, nurses, and Nick.

On November 16, Nick and his parents—his mother in a ventilator-equipped wheelchair, attended by a nurse—participated in a hearing on the charges against him. They followed the advice of a Woodson administrator who warned against bringing in an attorney “because it might create a confrontational climate.” The hearing was worse than confrontational; it was inquisitorial. The hearing officer said to Nick: “You haven’t really given us a good reason why you did this, and we suspect you were really looking to buy something else.” “Why don’t you believe me?” Nick asked, according to his father.

The board ruled against Nick, assigning him to another school. “By then, Nick’s descent had begun,” a newspaper reported. “His father recalls he was quiet, head down when he went to see his new high school.” On December 30 Steve Stuban walked into his son’s bedroom and saw a plastic bag of marijuana. He now realized that Nick’s “disciplinary experience had inadvertently encouraged the behavior it was designed to discourage. ‘Nick was looking to pot to ease his pain,’ said Sandy Stuban.” Desperate, Nick sent a text message to a friend saying he wanted to take his life. “After a tense night, when he wandered off and police searched for him, his family took him to a mental health clinic. He was admitted to a psychiatric hospital.” A week later, diagnosed with depression, Nick was released. The psychiatrists told the parents “they didn’t think Nick would harm himself.” They advised counseling, which he started, and prescribed an antidepressant, which he took.

Were the Stubans unaware that the alliance between the educational system and the mental health establishment was responsible for their predicament? Or did they realize it but deny this frightful insight? We do not know. What we do know is that they bought into Nick’s psychiatric degradation disguised as scientific mental health practice and suicide prevention.

On January 5, 2011, Nick killed himself. He left a note for his parents in which he referred to “life’s unfairness.” Poor Nick was too young to recognize that, more than unfairness, his mistreatment was a manifestation of the malice lurking in the hearts of all too many unhappy educational and mental health professionals.

Why do people kill themselves? Because they are mentally ill, assert the mental health experts, a message the media blindly repeats. “Mental illness kills.” In this view suicide is the result of mental illness, just as death from cancer is the result of bodily illness. This is patent nonsense, mindless belief in a literalized metaphor endowed with the power of agency.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health the persons most likely to kill themselves are the young and the old. Its website adds: “A person who appears suicidal should not be left alone and needs immediate mental-health treatment.” This is anti-suicide propaganda, pure and simple.

The actions of the suicide speak louder than the words of persons who presume to speak for them, while trying as best they can to deprive them of dignity and liberty. The most plausible explanation-motive for suicide at any age is the desire to die. Although every person’s reason for killing himself is uniquely personal, as a broad generalization we might say that the young choose voluntary death to escape the pain and responsibility of having to make a life for themselves, the old to escape the consequences of loss of autonomy due to disease and disability.

The suicidal person wants to get away from his life, his social environment. His action is best viewed as a form of emigration or secession. Jean Améry, the Austrian Holocaust survivor and bitter opponent of coerced suicide prevention protested, “I don’t like the word Selbstmord [self-murder] . . . I prefer to speak of Freitod [voluntary death]. . . . [T]here is no carcinoma that devours me, no infarction that fells me, no uremic crisis that takes away my breath. I am that which lays hands upon me, who dies after taking barbiturates, ‘from hand to mouth.’”

Jefferson on Suicide

In 1779 the Virginia legislature was considering a bill to repeal the punishment for suicide. Jefferson supported it and offered the following statement on its behalf:

Suicide is by law punishable by forfeiture of chattels. This bill exempts it from forfeiture. The suicide injures the State less than he who leaves it with his effects. If the latter then not be punished, the former should not. As to the example, we need not fear its influence. Men are too much attached to life, to exhibit frequent instances of depriving themselves of it. At any rate, the quasi-punishment of confiscation will not prevent it. . . . That men in general, too, disapprove of this severity, is apparent from the constant practice of juries finding the suicide in a state of insanity; because they have no other way of saving the forfeiture. Let it then be done away.

Jefferson went further. He considered suicide a perfectly rational act, viewing it as a kind of emigration. In his correspondence with Dr. Samuel Brown, a professor of medicine at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, concerning the use of toxic plants for killing oneself he wrote:

The most elegant thing of that kind known is a preparation of the Jamestown weed, Datura-Stramonium, invented by the French in the time of Robespierre. Every man of firmness carried it constantly in his pocket to anticipate the guillotine. It brings on the deep sleep as quietly as fatigue does the ordinary sleep, without the least struggle. . . . It seems far preferable to the Venesection of the Romans, the Hemlock of the Greeks, and the Opium of the Turks. . . . There are ills in life as desperate and intolerable, to which it would be the rational relief.

The term “Stramonium” is originally from the Greek strychnos (nightshade) and manikos (mad). All parts of Datura plants contain significant quantities of the alkaloids atropine, hyoscyamine, and scopolamine, chemicals that may be fatal if ingested by humans or animals. In the United States the plant is called “Jamestown weed” after the city in Virginia where British soldiers were drugged with it while attempting to suppress Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. Today a person who so casually informs another of the suicidal potential of a readily available substance runs the risk of being charged with the crime of “assisting suicide.”

The result of this cultural-legal atmosphere is the destruction of the public’s trust in members of the medical profession and other formerly respected authorities. While suicide prohibitions—usually called “suicide prevention measures”—have not succeeded in preventing suicides, they have succeeded in preventing people from having an honest, private conversation about life and death. Those who trust mental health professionals with their innermost thoughts are likely to find themselves punished with psychiatric incarceration and lifelong stigmatization. Suicidal persons and their would-be helpers alike are paralyzed by prohibitionist censorship, deception, and legislation requiring the betrayal of trust. The first and major victims of the war on suicide, as in all wars, are liberty and truth.

Psychiatrists are expected—legally, medically, and socially—to prevent individuals from killing themselves. As professionals they are also expected to lie and withhold information about the subject. The result is that people can no longer trust physicians, teachers, science writers, or journalists, virtually all of whom have been co-opted, suborned, seduced, or intimidated by the anti-suicide apparatus of the Mental Health System and the Therapeutic State.

Emigration is “leav[ing] one’s place of residence or country to live elsewhere” (Webster’s). Secession is the peaceful separation of political entities. Analogically, we may view divorce as marital secession, and suicide as personal secession. Both terms refer to and are in part synonymous with “separation.”

Viewed as emigrant, the suicide moves from the land of the living to the land of the dead. Regarded as a personal secessionist, he separates himself from his family and society. Diagnosed as incompetent to know his own best interest, the suicide is declared insane, becomes the property of the federal government, and is stamped with the title of ignobility.

In the traditional religious worldview the sole agent with legitimate power to decide who should die is God, the Creator. In the modern medical view the sole such agent is the Therapeutic State. Secession—defiance of control by church and State—is the ultimate escape from oppression, the ultimate declaration of freedom.

According to Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution, “No title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States,” forbidding the State from ennobling and favoring a class of Americans. The Constitution does not forbid the United States from degrading and disfavoring a class of Americans. Formerly, societies had “nobles”—dukes and princes and kings—persons people were expected to look up to and respect. Today, societies have ignobles—depressives and schizophrenics and suicidals—nonpersons people are expected to look down on and disrespect.

Today most people in the West regard killing oneself as an abhorrent temptation and avoid thinking about it. When they do think about suicide, they view such thinking as prima facie “abnormal” and readily accept the concept of “suicidal ideation,” a common medical term for thoughts about suicide.

We do not talk about “sex ideation” or “eating ideation” or “vacation ideation.” Why do we need and make up the special term “suicidal ideation”? To enable us to categorize it as a “psychiatric symptom,” a hidden manifestation of “serious mental illness” and “dangerousness to self and others,” a violation of the mental health laws, punished by incarceration in a mental health facility, and augmented by coerced psychiatric drugging. Failed suicide is also illegal, punished by similar psychiatric sanctions. The psychiatrist is regarded as an expert in “evaluating” and “detecting” this symptom and conducting himself accordingly as a coercive agent of the State. Although the psychiatrist who functions thus is an adversary of the nominal patient, law, medicine, and the public define and regard him as a “caring doctor,” an ally of his involuntary “patient.”

Merriam-Webster defines “ideation” as a noun: “the capacity for or the act of forming or entertaining ideas <suicidal ideation>.” This conceptualization is both the cause and the consequence of the psychiatric view of suicide as psychopathological. Thinking about sex, eating, or vacation is “reflection,” “longing,” “planning,” “pondering,” or simply “thinking”—not “ideation.” The psychiatric premise that thinking about suicide is a symptom of the disease “clinical depression” is justificatory rhetoric: Thinking about suicide is simply thinking. It is also, as Nietzsche famously observed, a tool of self-preservation: “The thought of suicide is a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad night.” The difference between the psychiatric and Nietzschean concepts of thinking about suicide illustrates the problem: For psychiatry it is a disease to be forcibly prevented and treated; for Nietzsche it is a remedy to be appreciated and understood.

The unlawfulness of suicide is further affirmed by the illegality of assisting the act. Assisting legal acts is legal. Assisted cooking, for example, is a common practice, performed and provided by family, friends, restaurants, schools, and other institutions. However, assisted suicide is a criminal offense unless the assistance is provided by a licensed physician in a jurisdiction in which specific legislation explicitly permits it: Then it is a medical service. The truth is that the only thing that makes physician-assisted suicide a medical service is that the means used for it is a prescription for a barbiturate, a document the law treats as if it were a prescription for insulin for a diabetic. Suppose doctors assisted suicide by shooting, stabbing, or strangling us at our request. Would we still call it “physician-assisted suicide”? Would we still classify and condone it as a medical treatment?

Socrates, let us recall, died of assisted suicide: He killed himself by ingesting a lethal dose of a substance the Greeks called pharmakon—a word that means both medicine and poison—procured for him by others. Socrates did not need medical help to kill himself. Why do we act as if we do? Because we like to die peacefully with the help of a drug that puts us to sleep forever; and because, at the same time, we wage wars on drugs especially useful for this purpose and suborn physicians to bootleg them. In the absence of prescription laws—and, more generally, of drug laws—there would be no need for, and no special problem of, physician-assisted suicide.

Although the air we breathe is polluted with anti-suicide propaganda, no amount of psychiatric smoke can obscure our knowledge that at bottom suicide is a solution. Authoritatively repressed, this truism reemerges as humor: “I was depressed last night so I called Lifeline. . . . Got a freakin’ call center in Pakistan. I told them I was suicidal. . . . They got all excited and asked if I could drive a truck.”

Suicide and the Identity of the Psychiatrist

Contemporary discourse about suicide seems to be about understanding the individual who says he intends to kill himself or to whom such intention is attributed by others. In fact the true subject of such discourse is the professional identity of the psychiatrist as bona fide physician, contingent on his presumed medical competence and legal duty to “save lives,” especially the lives of persons who do not want to live.

As a phenomenon, suicide is ancient. As medical problem it is recent. The medicalization of homicide—both auto- and heterohomicide—is an aspect of the birth and growth of pharmacracy and the Therapeutic State. Medical historians William F. Bynum and Michael Neve observe: “By early Victorian times, suicide had been more or less completely medicalized.” What do these writers mean when they use the term “medicalization?” They mean that melanoma is a medical problem by nature, whereas masturbation is a medical problem by culture. One is a disease intrinsically, the other is a disease by imputation. That is why we do not talk about the medicalization of bodily diseases, such as infections and malignancies, but do talk about the medicalization of mental diseases, such as dangerousness and depression.

Understanding a person and coercing him are mutually antagonistic and incompatible functions and roles—and we all know this. I have long objected to the social expectation that the psychiatrist be both his patient’s ally and adversary, and the psychiatrist’s willingness to play both roles. The dilemmas and depravities of double agency are intrinsic to psychiatry and will not go away. Honest psychiatrists cannot help but confront it. Hapless patients are doomed to be injured by it.

That medicalization forms an integral part of the modern zeitgeist is obvious. Some 50 years ago I coined the term “Therapeutic State” and suggested that coercive psychiatric suicide prevention is one of its defining emblems. Opposing this revered ritual is a thankless task but a worthy goal.

“The time is out of joint—O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!,” soliloquizes Hamlet (act 1, scene 5, 188–190). For the lover of liberty and responsibility, the time always seems out of joint. Setting it right will always be a thankless task.

If suicide be deemed a problem, it is a moral and political problem, not a disease in need of diagnosis, prevention, punishment, or treatment. Managing suicide as if it were a medical problem will succeed only in debasing medicine and corrupting the law. Pretending to be the pride of medicine, psychiatry is its shame.

Before his shooting spree Loughner had produced a video he called “My Final Thoughts,” in which he said, “All humans are in need of sleep. Jared Loughner is a human. Hence, Jared Loughner is in need of sleep.” On the morning of his massacre he posted a message on his MySpace account acknowledging his sense that he was at the end of his rope and his decision to let go: “Goodbye. Dear friends . . . Please don’t be mad at me.”

“War is a continuation of politics by other means,” said Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831). I suggest that, similarly, mass murder in plain sight, such as Loughner committed, is a continuation of suicide by other means. Sometimes it is called “suicide by proxy” or “suicide by cop.”

Loughner, to use his metaphor, has gone to sleep. And so have we if we prefer to believe that his self-destructive and destructive act is the senseless product of his “mental illness” rather than the result of his planned, “sensible” decision. The latter view is unpopular and unacceptable because it acknowledges Loughner’s humanity and free will, precisely the qualities that psychiatrists—aided and abetted by the criminal justice system—are intent on removing from persons they label “mad.” This medicalized view of certain offenses—usually crimes that particularly upset people—has, for reasons I have presented elsewhere, become widely accepted in our society, embraced equally by the right and the left.

Normally, we infer the motive for an action from its consequences. For Loughner, one of the consequences of his action is that his life is over, if not biologically then socially. Loughner was well aware of his failure to transition from childhood to adulthood. After years of fruitless travail, he decided to bring his life to a dramatic end. He committed mass murder and let himself be destroyed by the society that, he felt, obstructed his efforts to succeed.

Loughner’s crime, like any act, was not senseless at all, provided we are willing to put ourselves in his shoes. Of course, it makes no sense if we are unwilling to do that, denying the personhood of the actor, dismissing a priori his possessing free will, attributing his action to mental disease instead of personal decision.

The only thing we know with certainty about the Loughner case is the identity of the shooter. We do not know why he committed this crime. Nevertheless, commentators ritually refer to Loughner as the “alleged” assailant and confidently assert that he is crazy, deranged, lunatic, mentally ill, and schizophrenic. Former Vice President Dick Cheney told NBC News, “We need to be a little careful about assuming that somehow the rest of society or the political class bears the responsibility for what happened here when it was the act of a deranged, crazed individual that committed a crime.”

E. Fuller Torrey, a recognized expert on schizophrenic murderers, agrees. He refers to Loughner as “the alleged shooter” and states that he “is reported to have had symptoms associated with schizophrenia . . . and almost certainly was seriously mentally ill and untreated. . . . These tragedies are the inevitable outcome of five decades of failed mental-health policies.”

Torrey’s remedy for the problem of people being at liberty to commit crimes and suffer the consequences is intensifying the traditional legal-psychiatric practice of incarcerating innocent individuals and calling it “hospitalization” and “treatment” and even “suicide and crime prevention”: “The solution to this situation is obvious—make sure individuals with serious mental illnesses are receiving treatment. The mistake was not in emptying the nation’s hospitals but rather in ignoring the treatment needs of the patients being released. . . . Others are unaware they are sick and should be required by law to receive assisted outpatient treatment, including medication and counseling. . . . If they do not comply with the court-ordered treatment plan, they can and should be involuntarily admitted to a hospital.”

In contrast, Ashley Figueroa, a former girlfriend of Loughner, told ABC News that she remembers him as “a drug user with a grudge against the government. . . . I think he’s faking everything. . . . I think that he has been planning this for some time.” A writer for Salon.com adds: “Figueroa is not a doctor, and these claims conflict with the opinion of top doctors in the field of psychiatry. (Dr. E. Fuller Torrey actually told Salon that Loughner looks like a ‘textbook’ case of paranoid schizophrenia.)”

True, Figueroa is not a “doctor.” Does having a medical degree qualify a person to diagnose someone he has never laid eyes on as a schizophrenic? Does the fact that Figueroa knew Loughner, that they had a real-life human relationship, count for nothing?

It did not take long for authorities, in Arizona as well as nationally, to heed Torrey’s advice to cure would-be “schizophrenic murderers” by constricting the liberties of all Americans. On January 15, exactly one week after Loughner’s rampage, one of his victims, J. Eric Fuller, 63, a military veteran, attended a televised forum on “helping the community to heal” and angrily confronted a fellow participant with the metaphor, “You’re dead.” Fuller’s words were interpreted as a “threat,” and he was involuntarily committed for a 72-hour mental-health evaluation. According to CBS News, “[Pima County sheriff’s spokesman Jason] Ogan said the hospital will determine when Fuller will be released.”

The war on words continued in Congress. Before Tucson, the Republicans opposed Obamacare, calling the bill “job killing.” Overnight, that term vanished from the political vocabulary, replaced by “job crushing” and other metaphors. Foolishly, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank hailed this piece of semantic surgery: “[House Speaker John] Boehner, in a pair of statements on his Web page, dropped the ‘job-killing’ phrase in favor of ‘job-crushing’ and ‘job-destroying.’ House Majority Leader Eric Cantor . . . did not allow the k-word to escape his lips at Tuesday afternoon’s news conference. . . . [T]he new GOP majority generally showed a skill that had been lacking in the Republican caucus for the past two years: self-restraint.”

Wedded to the idea that we have two kinds of lawbreakers in America, sane and insane, we are unable to attend to the human problems we call “mental illnesses.” But not to worry: We can always operate on the vocabulary.

In contemporary English the meaning of the noun “coercion” is clear and uncontroversial. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines it as “the act, process, or power of coercing; . . . <a promise obtained by coercion is never binding> . . . synonyms: arm-twisting, force, compulsion, constraint, duress, pressure . . .; near antonyms: agreement, approval, consent, permission.” Coercion is emphatically not the private “subjective response” of the oppressed person; it is the objective, publicly observable action of the oppressor. According to the authoritative Black’s Law Dictionary (Fourth Revised Edition), the relationship between hospital psychiatrist and patient clearly constitutes coercion: “COERCION. Compulsion; constraint; compelling by force or arms.”

Contemporary practitioners of psychiatry, enlightened by neuroscience, brag about their love of the naked power they exercise over their captives.

In her book Weekends at Bellevue, Julie Holland explains:

So why am I so attracted to this patient population? I’ve always been enthralled by insanity. . . . [N]ow I am the doctor in charge of Bellevue’s psychiatric emergency room. . . . I run two fifteen-hour overnight shifts on Saturday and Sunday nights. They call me “the weekend attending.” It feels just like rock-and-roll psychiatry to me. This is my Saturday night gig. . . . [The police deliver a prisoner receiving methadone detoxification.] I go inside to talk to Nancy [the nurse]. “The cop wants dead weight, the prisoner wants methadone. Looks like we should probably just take advantage of the situation.” We agree to do something that everyone knows damn well is completely against the rules. I have never done it before or since: I tell the patient we are going to give him an injection of methadone, and we give him Thorazine. . . . [S]ometimes down here, the end justifies the means. This way, he calms down, the cop is happy, they both leave and we can go on with our night.

The State-sanctioned forcible control of one group of innocent persons by another group of persons authorized to control them is, of course, as old as civilization. We call its prototype “slavery.” Justified by religious and philosophical authorities, the supporters of such systems of institutionalized domination-submission always felt morally superior to those who rejected their reasoning and opposed their power. Today, the system based on the same age-old rationalizations is called “psychiatry.” I have renamed it “psychiatric slavery.”

“If slavery is not wrong,” declared Abraham Lincoln, “nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think, and feel.” Slavery is wrong because it empowers one group of persons to deprive another group of liberty on the ground of who they are, not of what they do. I knew very little about Lincoln when I grew up in post-World War I Hungary. But I did recognize, as a gut feeling, that if the domination of the mental patient by the psychiatrist is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think and feel.

Wrong but Necessary

Many decades later I learned about Lincoln’s more complex, confused, and conflicted opinions about slavery, and also about the inconsistency of libertarians’ passionate commitment to the principle of self-ownership as a pillar of individual liberty and their penchant to turn their gaze away from psychiatric slavery as an integral part of the political-social fabric of modern Western societies.

In 1999 an editorial in the British Medical Journal warned, “The growing pressures on them [psychiatrists] to deliver public protection was perhaps inevitable, given the rise of biopsychomedical paradigms as explanations for the vicissitudes of life in modern Western society. Psychiatrists have played their part by assuming the authority to explain, categorize, manage, and prognose in situations where well defined disease (arguably their only clearcut remit) was not present.”

Such warnings have not deterred prominent psychiatrists from making brazen claims about the nature of psychiatry as a medical specialty. In an editorial in the September 2010 issue of Current Psychiatry, titled “Integrating Psychiatry with Other Medical Specialties,” psychiatrist Henry A. Nasrallah—professor of psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine (my alma mater)—writes, “As a specialty that deals with brain disorders, psychiatry is now much more integrated with other medical and surgical specialties than in the past. Psychiatry is no longer perceived as a ‘different’ discipline. . . .” Where is the outrage at this shameless mendacity? Nowhere.

Forgotten Human-Rights Violations

The human-rights violations of chattel slavery, colonialism, the Inquisition, national socialism, and communism have been well documented. Sporadic reports of the human-rights violations of psychiatry abound in our newspapers and magazines. They are quickly forgotten as exceptional “abuses.” More than 50 years ago I set myself the task of not letting the profession and the public forget that psychiatry—the oppression of the patient by the psychiatrist, today justified as the patient’s liberation from an illness that robs him of freedom and responsibility—belongs in the same pantheon of brutal oppressions as do chattel slavery, colonialism, the Inquisition, national socialism, international socialism (communism), and institutions dedicated to the coercive betterment of humanity not yet invented.

Sixty years ago, when I was young, the psychiatrist was embarrassed by his role as coercer. Now, when I am old, he is proud of it. That, in my opinion, is the sum total of the “progress” achieved by modern, “scientific psychiatry.” It is a fearful truism that we learn from history that we do not learn from history: “The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold on us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.” (Thomas Jefferson, 1782)

But this wolf does not enter. He is inherent in human nature, and we must purge it from our own souls, one soul at a time.

Before his shooting spree Loughner had produced a video he called “My Final Thoughts,” stating: “All humans are in need of sleep. Jared Loughner is a human. Hence, Jared Loughner is in need of sleep.” On the morning of his massacre he posted a message on his MySpace account acknowledging his sense that he was at the end of his rope and his decision to let go: “Goodbye. Dear friends . . . Please don’t be mad at me.”

“War is a continuation of politics by other means,” said Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831). I suggest that, similarly, mass murder in plain sight, such as Loughner committed, is a continuation of suicide by other means. Sometimes it is called “suicide by proxy” or “suicide by cop.”

Loughner, to use his metaphor, has gone to sleep. And so have we if we prefer to believe that his self-destructive and destructive act is the senseless product of his “mental illness” rather than the result of his planned, “sensible” decision. The latter view is unpopular and unacceptable because it acknowledges Loughner’s humanity and free will, precisely the qualities that psychiatrists – aided and abetted by the criminal justice system – are intent on removing from persons they label “mad.” This medicalized view of certain offenses – usually crimes that particularly upset people – has, for reasons I have presented elsewhere, become widely accepted in our society, embraced equally by the right and the left.

Normally, we infer the motive for an action from its consequences. For Loughner, one of the consequences of his action is that his life is over, if not biologically then socially. Loughner was well aware of his failure to transition from childhood to adulthood. After years of fruitless travail, he decided to bring his life to a dramatic end. He committed mass murder and let himself be destroyed by the society that, he felt, obstructed his efforts to succeed.

Loughner’s crime, like any act, was not senseless at all, provided we are willing to put ourselves in his shoes. Of course, it makes no sense if we are unwilling to do that, denying the personhood of the actor, dismissing a priori his possessing free will, attributing his action to mental disease instead of personal decision.

Crime Is Alleged, Craziness Is Asserted

The only thing we know with certainty about the Loughner case is the identity of the shooter. We do not know why he committed this crime. Nevertheless, commentators ritually refer to Loughner as the “alleged” assailant and confidently assert that he is a crazy, deranged, lunatic, mentally ill and schizophrenic. Former Vice President Dick Cheney told NBC News: “We need to be a little careful about assuming that somehow the rest of society or the political class bears the responsibility for what happened here when it was the act of a deranged, crazed individual that committed a crime.”

E. Fuller Torrey, a recognized expert on schizophrenic murderers, agrees. He refers to Loughner as “the alleged shooter” and states that he “is reported to have had symptoms associated with schizophrenia … and almost certainly was seriously mentally ill and untreated…. These tragedies are the inevitable outcome of five decades of failed mental-health policies.”

Torrey’s remedy for the problem of people being at liberty to commit crimes and suffer the consequences is intensifying the traditional legal-psychiatric practice of incarcerating innocent individuals and calling it “hospitalization” and “treatment” and even “suicide and crime prevention”: “The solution to this situation is obvious — make sure individuals with serious mental illnesses are receiving treatment. The mistake was not in emptying the nation’s hospitals but rather in ignoring the treatment needs of the patients being released…. Others are unaware they are sick and should be required by law to receive assisted outpatient treatment, including medication and counseling…  If they do not comply with the court-ordered treatment plan, they can and should be involuntarily admitted to a hospital.”

In contrast, Ashley Figueroa, a former girlfriend of Loughner, told ABC News that she remembers Loughner as “a drug user with a grudge against the government…. I think he’s faking everything…. I think that he has been planning this for some time.” A writer for Salon.com adds: “Figueroa is not a doctor, and these claims conflict with the opinion of top doctors in the field of psychiatry. (Dr. E. Fuller Torrey actually told Salon that Loughner looks like a ‘textbook’ case of paranoid schizophrenia.)”

True, Figueroa is not a “doctor.” Do we need to have a medical degree to diagnose a person we have never laid eyes on as schizophrenic? Does the fact that Figueroa knew Loughner, that they had a real-life human relationship, count for nothing?

It did not take long for authorities, in Arizona as well as nationally, to heed Torrey’s advice to cure would-be “schizophrenic murderers” by constricting the liberties of all Americans. On January 15, exactly one week after Loughner’s rampage, one of his victims, J. Eric Fuller, 63, a military veteran, attended a televised forum on “helping the community to heal” and angrily confronted a fellow participant with the metaphor, “You’re dead.” Fuller’s words were interpreted as a “threat,” and he was involuntarily committed for a 72-hour mental-health evaluation. According to CBS News, “[Pima County sheriff's spokesman Jason] Ogan said the hospital will determine when Fuller will be released.”

The war on words continued in Congress. Before Tucson, the Republicans opposed Obamacare, calling the bill “job killing.” Overnight, that term vanished from the political vocabulary, replaced by “job crushing” and other metaphors. Foolishly, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank hailed this piece of semantic surgery: “[House Speaker John] Boehner, in a pair of statements on his Web page, dropped the ‘job-killing’ phrase in favor of ‘job-crushing’ and ‘job-destroying.’ House Majority Leader Eric Cantor … did not allow the k-word to escape his lips at Tuesday afternoon’s news conference…. [T]he new GOP majority generally showed a skill that had been lacking in the Republican caucus for the past two years: self-restraint.”

Wedded to the idea that we have two kinds of lawbreakers in America, sane and insane, we are unable to attend to the human problems we call “mental illnesses.” But not to worry, we can always operate on the vocabulary.

This is not news. More than 200 hundred years ago Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) warned: “I believe that in the end humanitarianism will triumph, but I fear that, at the same time, the world will become a big hospital, each person acting as the other’s humane nurse.”

Moreover, Goethe foresaw the moral hollowness of the “humanitarian science” on which such therapeutic tyranny would rest: “I could never have known so well how paltry men are, and how little they care for really high aims, if I had not tested them by my scientific researches. Thus I saw that most men only care for science so far as they get a living by it, and that they worship even error when it affords them a subsistence.”

The depths to which such men would happily sink when worshiping error brings them fame and fortune became obvious only in the twentieth century.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908), the great Brazilian novelist and playwright, advanced the prescient literary satirization of the dark art of psychiatric diagnosis and the engine that drives it: the phony expert’s insatiable vanity and thirst for controlling his fellow man. His short story “O alienista” (1882, “The psychiatrist”) is a fable of a celebrated doctor retiring to a small town to pursue his scientific investigation of the human mind, gradually finding more and more of the townsfolk insane and needing to be incarcerated in his private asylum. Eventually he alone is left at liberty. As soon as modern psychiatry became a legitimate branch of medicine, Machado de Assis recognized and exposed its quintessentially unscientific-sadistic character.

It remained for the French playwright Jules Romains (1885–1972) to call public attention to the corruption of modern medicine by political power. “It’s a matter of principle with me,” declares his protagonist, “Dr. Knock” (1923), “to regard the entire population as our patients. . . . ‘Health’ is a word we could just as well erase from our vocabularies. . . . If you think it over, you’ll be struck by its relation to the admirable concept of the nation in arms, a concept from which our modern states derive their strength.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), too, has played an important part in persuading people that health is an abnormal state. This old joke is illustrative: “If the patient is early for his appointment, he is anxious; if he is on time, he is obsessive-compulsive; if he is late, he is hostile.”

Particular psychiatric diagnoses have not escaped professional criticism. Wishing to make a name for themselves as psychiatrists, “critics” object to one or another diagnosis (homosexuality)—or to “overdiagnosis” (ADHD)—but continue to respect the American Psychiatric Association (APA) as a scientific organization and regard the various incarnations of the DSM as respectable legitimating documents. This is dishonest. Confronted with the DSM, the challenge we face is to delegitimize the authenticators, the APA and DSM, not distract attention from their fundamental phoniness by ridiculing one or another “diagnosis” and trying to remove it from the magical list.

I have consistently rejected this piecemeal approach. In my essay “The Myth of Mental Illness,” published in 1960, and in my book with the same title that appeared a year later, I stated my view forthrightly. I proposed that we view the phenomena conventionally called “mental diseases” as behaviors that disturb others (or sometimes the self), reject the image of “mental patients” as helpless victims of patho-biological events outside their control, and refuse to participate in coercive psychiatric practices as incompatible with the foundational moral ideals of free societies. In short, I rejected the authority of the APA as a legitimating organization and of the DSM as a legitimating document. I believe nothing less can undo the mischief wrought by the successive editions of the “psychiatric bible.”

Settled by Political Power

But times have changed. Fifty years ago it made sense to assert that mental illnesses are not diseases. It makes no sense to do so today. Professional debate about what counts as mental illness has been replaced by political-judicial decree. The controversy about the nature of so-called mental diseases/disorders has been settled by the holders of political power: They have decreed that “mental illness is a disease like any other.” Political power and professional self-interest have united in turning false beliefs into lying facts: “Mental illness can be accurately diagnosed, successfully treated, just as physical illness” (President William Clinton, 1999). “Just as things go wrong with the heart and kidneys and liver, so things go wrong with the brain” (Surgeon General David Satcher, 1999).

The claim that “mental illnesses are diagnosable disorders of the brain” is not based on scientific research; it is a deception and perhaps self-deception. My claim that mental illnesses are fictitious illnesses is also not based on scientific research; it rests on the pathologist’s materialist-scientific definition of illness as the structural or functional alteration of cells, tissues, and organs. If we accept this definition of disease, then it follows that mental illness is a metaphor, and asserting that view is stating an analytic truth not subject to empirical falsification.

For centuries the theocratic State exercised authority and used force in the name of God. The Founders sought to protect the American people from the religious tyranny of the State. They did not anticipate, and could not have anticipated, that one day medicine would become a religion and that the alliance between medicine and the State would then threaten personal liberty and responsibility exactly as they had been threatened by the alliance between church and State.

The Founders faced the challenge of separating the cure of souls by priests from the control of people by politicians. Today the therapeutic State exercises authority and uses force in the name of health. We face the challenge of separating the consensual treatment of patients by medical doctors from the coercive control of persons by agents of the State pretending to be healers.

When psychiatry was in its infancy the belief that all human “dysfunctions” are manifestations of brain diseases was a naive error. In its maturity the mistake was treated as a valid scientific theory and the justification for a powerful ideology and the powerful institutions based on it. Today, in its senescence, psychiatry is deceit and self-deceit—coercion concealed as objective science (“medical diagnosis”) and benevolent help (“medical treatment”). As a result, paraphrasing Orwell, telling the truth becomes “a revolutionary act.”

In the medieval world Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas had declared that whoever deliberately took the life given to him by his Creator showed disregard for the will and authority of God and was guilty of a mortal sin. In the modern world “self-slaughter” was declared a crime. In Great Britain the crime of suicide was repealed by the Suicide Act of 1961; those who failed in the attempt would no longer be prosecuted.

After 1776 the United States adopted English criminal penalties against suicide, but American courts never enforced them. Nevertheless, as late as 1963 attempted suicide still was a felony in six states—North and South Dakota, New Jersey, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Washington. Today, everyone “knows” that suicide is a mental illness, proving the wisdom of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749–1832) observation, “In the newspapers and encyclopedias, in schools and universities, everywhere error rides high and basks in the consciousness of having the majority on its side.”

Because medicalization suffuses our thinking about all manner of human problems, we bracket the term “suicide” with “prevention,” implying a claim for which there is no evidence—namely, that suicide is a “medical problem.” We prevent diseases but prohibit crimes. Disease is said to be prevented, not prohibited, even when a State mandate is involved, as with vaccination. Driving while intoxicated is a crime though the purpose of the law is to prevent accidents committed by drunk drivers.

Suicide prevention ought to be called “suicide prohibition.” Why is this important? Because suicide is action-doing, not disease-enduring, and because the basic tool of the State is coercion not therapy. Preventive measures are aimed at keeping undesirable events from happening, prohibitions at preventing persons from engaging in behaviors defined as “dangerous” to themselves or others. The differences between these two modes of influencing/controlling the conduct of others are illustrated by the differences between the “war on cancer” and the “war on drugs.” The former is fought with money and medical technology, the latter with laws and prisons.

The psychiatric perspective on life began to seep into the zeitgeist of modern Western culture in the nineteenth century and was ripe when Freud arrived on the scene in the 1880s. His influence lay mainly in his successful elaboration and popularization of the language of psychopathology and psychotherapy. By the time he died, in 1939, Wystan Auden was moved to offer this marvelously perceptive memorial tribute to him: “. . . if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, / to us he is no more a person / now but a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives.”

“Mental Illness” and the Loss of Credibility

People know but do not experience that our everyday language refracts social reality in accordance with prevailing cultural beliefs. As long as a person remains unentangled in the State’s psychiatric control system, he is not likely to understand its actual functioning and its threat to basic human rights. Once he becomes a “mental health consumer,” he is considered credible only when he praises the system. When he criticizes it he is dismissed as lacking insight into his illness. (Psychiatric critics who are not mental health consumers are also likely to be dismissed.)

Today, suicide prohibition is a vast, bureaucratic legal-psychiatric enterprise. From the lawyer’s and psychiatrist’s point of view, it is medical treatment. From the would-be suicide’s point of view, it is deprivation of liberty. The following excerpt from an email I received some time ago is a typical example of a “suicide prevention intervention” presented by and from the point of view of a “prevented” subject:

I am a doctoral student in psychology. . . . I was depressed and, seeking support, had called my parents and told them that I was suicidal. They promptly called the police, who arrived at my apartment, handcuffed me, and transported me to the local “psychiatric center.” After many hours of waiting, the student—now called a “patient”—was “evaluated.” The psychiatrist “spoke to me for approximately 10 minutes before she decided that it was in my ‘best interest’ for me to be committed to a psychiatric ward. I protested, of course, believing that wrenching me away from life would cause far more harm than good. She expressed no empathy, however. . . . I was finally released from the hospital five days after my arrival. I can certainly say that I received no benefit from my stay in the psychiatric ward. I am more depressed than I was before, having been traumatized by my experience with the mental health care system.

Educational authorities deny the real consequences of suicide prevention for college and university students and persist instead in restating their medicalized mendacities. Following three suicides within a period of a few months, Cornell University President David J. Skorton basks in his own platitudes: “On and off campus, there is an epidemic of suicide among young people. . . . As a father, teacher, physician and president of a university where we have recently experienced the horror of multiple suicides, I have long been concerned about this national public health crisis.”

Every death is a crisis for the affected family, but three deaths, or 30 deaths, do not constitute an “epidemic” or a “national public health crisis” in a nation of 300 million people.

“What is the way ahead?” Skorton asks. His answer: “[W]e need more research into the factors that lead to suicide in this age group and how to identify those at greatest risk. . . . [S]tudents must learn that it is smart to ask for help.”

This is a lie. The college student who trusts college mental health personnel is misguided. The psychiatrist, psychologist, or social worker employed by the college serves the interests of the college not the student: The student who seeks such a professional’s “help” is more likely to be entrapped and harmed than empowered and helped.

So what can the parents of young-adult children, struggling with the hazards inherent to that period of life, do to protect them? They can avoid defining them as “mentally ill,” enlighten them about the true function of school mental health services, and thus shield them from their “care.” And they can continue to fulfill their responsibilities, as the parents of nearly grown-up children, to demonstrate their love by listening, advising, and supporting them in their struggle.

“Nature,” observed Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), “admits no lie.” While nature neither lies nor tells the truth, persons habitually do both. As the famous French mathematician and philosopher Antoine Augustin Cournot (1801-1877) observed, “It is inconceivable that [in the science of politics] telling the truth can ever become more profitable than telling lies.” Indeed, deception and prevarication are indispensable tools for the politician and the psychiatrist—experts expected to explain, predict, and prevent unwanted human behaviors.

The integrity of the natural scientific enterprise depends on truth-seeking and truth-speaking by individuals engaged in activities we call “scientific,” and on the scientific community’s commitment to expose and reject erroneous explanations and false “facts.” In contrast, the stability of political organizations and of the ersatz religions we call “behavioral sciences” depends on the loyalty of its practitioners to established doctrines and institutions and the rejection of truth-telling as injurious to the welfare of the group that rests on its commitment to fundamental falsehoods. Not by accident, we call revelations of the “secrets” of nature “discoveries,” and revelations of the secrets of powerful individuals and institutions “exposés.”

Because nature is not an agent, many of its workings can be understood by observation, reasoning, experiment, measurement, and calculation. Deception and divination are powerless to advance our understanding of how the world works; indeed, they preempt, prevent, and substitute for such understanding.

Psychiatry is one of the most important institutions of modern American society. Understanding modern psychiatry—the historical forces and the complex economic, legal, political, and social principles and practices that support it—requires understanding the epistemology of imitation and the sociology of distinguishing “originals” from “counterfeits.” With respect to disease, the process consists of two parts: One part is separating persons who suffer from demonstrable bodily diseases from those who do not, but pretend or claim to; another part is separating physicians who believe it is desirable to distinguish between illness and health, sick persons and healthy, from physicians who reject this desideratum and insist that everyone who acts or claims to be sick has an illness and deserves to be treated. In an effort to clarify the difference between medicine and psychiatry—between real medicine and fake medicine—I proposed a satirical definition of psychiatry, slightly revised as follows:

The subject matter of psychiatry is neither minds nor mental diseases, but lies, beginning with the names of the participants in the transaction—the designation of one party as “patient,” even though he is not ill, and the other party as “therapist” even though he is not treating any illness. The lies continue with the deceptions that comprise the subject matter proper of the discipline—the psychiatric “diagnoses,” “prognoses,” and “treatments”—and end with the lies that, like shadows, follow ex-mental patients through the rest of their lives—the records of denigrations called “depression,” “schizophrenia,” or whatnot, and of imprisonments called “hospitalization.” If we wished to give psychiatry an honest name, we ought to call it “pseudology,” or the art and science of lies and lying.

The imitation of illness is memorably portrayed by Molière (1622–1673) in his famous comedy, The Imaginary Invalid (Le malade imaginaire). The main character is a healthy individual who wants to be treated as if he were sick by others, especially doctors. Since those days, we in the West have undergone an astonishing cultural-perceptual transformation of which we seem largely, perhaps wholly, unaware. Today medical healing is regarded as a form of applied science. At the same time, the medical profession defines imaginary illnesses as real illnesses, in effect abolishing the notion of pretended illness: Officially, malingering is now a disease “just as real” as melanoma.

The view that pretending to be mentally ill is itself a form of mental illness became psychiatric dogma during World War II. Kurt R. Eissler (1908-1999), then the quasi-official pope of the Freudian faith in America, declared: “It can be rightly claimed that malingering is always the sign of a disease often more severe than a neurotic disorder. . . . The diagnosis should never be made but by the psychiatrist.” Now, more than 50 years later, this medicalized concept of malingering is an integral part of the mindset of every well-trained, right-thinking Western psychiatrist. For example, Phillip J. Resnick, a leading American forensic psychiatrist, declares: “Detecting malingered mental illness is considered an advanced psychiatric skill, partly because you must understand thoroughly how genuine psychotic symptoms manifest.”

In World War I soldiers afraid of being killed in battle malingered; psychiatrists who wanted to protect them from being returned to the trenches diagnosed them as having a mental illness, then called “hysteria.” Today, almost a hundred years later, soldiers returning home and afraid of being without “health care coverage” diagnose themselves as having a mental illness, called “post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)”: Almost 50 percent of the troops returning from Iraq suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression “because they want to make sure that they continue to get health care coverage once their deployments have ended.” (Syracuse Post-Standard, Nov. 25, 2007, E1).

Psychiatrists and the science writers they deceive—and who eagerly deceive themselves—love to dwell on how far psychiatrists have “progressed” from their past practices. They have indeed, if we consider creating ever more mental illnesses/psychiatric diagnoses “progress.” Today psychiatrists assert that the person who regards himself as a mental patient suffers from a bona fide illness and laud him for his insight into his “having a disease” and “need for treatment.”At the same time, they lament the person who “denies” his mental illness, his “lack of insight” into being ill, and his “negative attitudes toward treatment seeking.” For example, from the International Journal of Eating Disorders we learn: “Considering that males have negative attitudes toward treatment-seeking and are less likely than females to seek treatment, efforts should be made to increase awareness of eating disorder symptomatology in male adolescents.”

Counterfeit art is forgery. Counterfeit testimony is perjury. But counterfeit illness is still illness—mental illness, officially decreed “an illness like any other.” The consequences of this policy—economic, legal, medical, moral, personal, philosophical, political, and social—are momentous: counterfeit disability, counterfeit disease, counterfeit doctoring, counterfeit rehabilitation, and the bureaucracies, courts, industries, and professions studying, teaching, practicing, administering, adjudicating, and managing them make up a substantial part of the national economies of modern Western societies and of the professional lives of the individuals in them.

When a psychiatrist gives expert testimony in a murder case, neither the identity of the killer nor the cause of the victim’s death is in doubt. What is in doubt is the killer’s “criminal responsibility”for the crime:

Did he or did he not possess “mens rea”(guilty mind) at the time of his offense?

Pro forma, the psychiatrist testifies about whether the killer was or was not insane at the time of the killing. De facto, because of the function of the term “insanity,” especially in the context of a murder trial, the psychiatrist-physician testifies about the defendant’s guilt or innocence. Moreover, his “expert opinion” is attributed to his medical expertise.

Law, psychiatry, and the public treat the term “insanity” (“mental illness”) as if it were a property inherent in, or attributable to, a person, a moral agent; that is, as if it were a phenomenon or fact, like having brown eyes or a broken arm. However, the insanity defense–like any courtroom defense against an accusation–is a tactic, not a fact. Debating the “validity” of insanity defenses is shadowboxing: The “experts” argue about dispositional tactics as if they were empirically verified or verifiable medical observations or facts; they disagree about how the criminal justice system ought to deal with the defendant, not about what the defendant did to his victim.

Murder trials are stages for the enactment and resolution of real-life tragedies. They are not settings devoted to truth-seeking. The script defines what the actors must say, and the play must end in acquittal, conviction, or a psychiatric verdict of “not guilty by reason of insanity”/“diminished capacity.”

In July 2008 a Welsh couple–Brian Thomas, 59 and his wife, Christine, 57–were vacationing in their camper. One night Brian strangled Christine, then called the police and told them he did it while he was sound asleep “dreaming” he was defending himself from an intruder. At Thomas’s criminal trial in November 2009 the court was told that “the couple had been asleep in their camper van in a car park when they were disturbed by youths in cars performing wheel spins and so moved elsewhere. However, Thomas then had a nightmare that one of the youths had broken into the van and later woke to find himself next to his wife’s body, at which point he called the police.” Court, prosecution, and defense agreed that Thomas suffered from “a sleep disorder and so had no control over his body when he attacked his wife of 40 years while they were both asleep.”

Thomas, we learned from press accounts, “regularly took anti-depressant drugs which made him impotent,” and the couple slept in separate bedrooms at home. He had stopped his medication before the holiday, allegedly to be able to have intercourse with his wife. Medical experts testified that “the sudden withdrawal of the drugs could have led to him having very vivid dreams.”

The defense claimed that Thomas was suffering from the “non-insane” form of automatism and asked for an acquittal. The consequences of finding Thomas “not guilty by reason of insanity,” explained Chief Crown Prosecutor Iwan Jenkins, “would have meant Mr. Thomas’s detention in a psychiatric hospital, but it is now clear that the psychiatrists feel that that would serve no useful purpose. . . . It is only because of highly sophisticated tests carried out by sleep experts that Mr. Thomas’s condition could be confirmed.”

According to reports, the jury was “directed to return a not-guilty verdict, allowing Mr. Thomas to leave court an innocent man.” The judge reassured Thomas “that in the eyes of the law he bore no responsibility for what he had done”and added that “he was a decent man and devoted husband.” If any words of praise were offered about Mrs. Thomas, they were not reported.

After the trial one defense expert–Dr. Chris Idzikowski, director of the Edinburgh Sleep Centre–was reported to have been “still unsure which form of sleep disorder caused Thomas to kill his wife, but he supports the court’s decision. . . . I’m sure there are people who have the disorder, commit a crime, and try to lean back on it to get away with it. . . . ‘I’m convinced he was not guilty. That said, you never know. Maybe he’s a genius who’s tricked me and everybody else and is now going to claim lots of insurance money for his wife’s death.’”

Prosecutor Jenkins alleged that “the circumstances of this case are almost unique in the UK.” Well, not quite. Under the heading “Homicidal Somnambulism,” Wikipedia lists 68 similar cases, many from Britain.

Sleep Driving

Kenneth Parks, a 23-year-old married man, lost money gambling, stole from his in-laws and employer, and was fired from his job. On Sunday, May 24, 1987, he planned to confess his misdeeds to his in-laws. But while he slept, he got up early, drove more than 14 miles to his in-laws’ home, broke in, assaulted his father-in-law, and stabbed his mother-in-law to death. He then drove himself to the police station, saying, “I think I have killed some people.”

“Sleep driving,” anyone?

A. F. kept loaded firearms in his room. His father slept in the adjoining room. Hearing a bump against the connecting door early one morning, A. F., allegedly still asleep, hollered. “You dog, what do you want here?” and fired the gun near to his hand, killing his father.

Willis Boshears, an American army sergeant stationed in England, was drinking in a pub, returned to his apartment with a young couple, and went to sleep on the floor. When he woke up, he found he had killed the woman. He then hid her body miles away.

All these “sleepwalkers” were acquitted.

Let us put ourselves in the position of a person charged with the duty of determining a defendant’s responsibility for killing while allegedly asleep. What information would help us arrive at a correct determination? Mainly, we would want to know as much as possible about the defendant’s relationship to his victim. The accounts of the Thomas case tell us very little about this. Instead, they dwell on the defendant’s alleged “sleep disorder,” his abnormal EEG, his being on and off “antidepressant” drugs, and his impaired sexual potency. None of this information helps a jury determine whether Thomas should be held responsible for killing his wife.

I am not an expert on sleep. What I do know is that sleep involves a general relaxation of the voluntary neuromuscular system, including that part of it necessary for keeping a person standing upright. Horses can sleep standing because their legs can lock, but human beings cannot do so. And horses too need to lie down to sleep deeply. The idea that a person may be able to rape and murder while asleep and not be responsible for his behavior is a product of the modern technology-based misunderstanding of the brain, the mind, sleep, and responsibility.