Don't forget that this was sanctioned by medical professionals at the time and is not much different than what occurs today throughout America where psychiatrists and psychologist work with corporations and police gangs to justify almost every despicable behavior you can imagine. Cop rapes and murders a teenager? You can find a psychologist that will say it was due to the pressures of the job. Government conducting experiments on people against their knowledge that results in harm. You can find a psychologist that authorized it and that will try to destroy the lives of people trying to expose it. Company uses sex or lies to sell a dangerous drug? There is a psychologist behind it.
Sometimes I ponder what a world where every respected profession had a (reasonable) “Hippocratic Oath” equivalent, and where this oath was bolstered both by the culture within the profession and by sanctioning authorities alike.
I’m usually all for decentralization and individual liberties, but yet I still find myself thinking this way.
Excellent idea! This would definitely apply for investors, entrepreneurs and software devs, like myself, if you consider those "respected" :). I took an "Ethics in Computing" course in college, and our reading contained a lot of Sherry Turkle. I don't even think doctors are required to take the Hippocratic oath, they have a lot of power over our lives as does law enforcement. And as technology becomes more-and-more of the fabric of reality (a disturbing trend, IMO), we as technical people have more responsibility for what happens.
There was a podcast a few years ago -- This American Life, or Criminal? I don't remember -- about a corrupt cop that tried to frame someone and get them committed to a psychiatric unit for some reason in retaliation for something.
It sounded preposterous, except the person had recorded audio of them busting into their home and they played it on the podcast. Chilling.
That's what everyone I told about my February 2014 incident in Wichita Kansas said, including now ex-friends I knew since elementary school.
At about 1 AM in the morning, I was soaking in the bathtub after a long day working on my startup, and I heard pounding at the door. My wife who was asleep got up and asked if she should get it. I said no, I would get dressed and handle it. Before I could the police were already inside, weapons drawn, IIRC about 8 of them. I didn't see my wife--but she told me later they immediately took her outside in the cold, handcuffed, in her socks and no jacket and grilled her about how I treated her. They ridiculed her for being a university instructor, for some reason. She denied that anything was going on, which was true.
I have had issues with mental illness, I know I seem weird to some people, but no history of violence--mostly I was withdrawn. A few years before, I was attacked by dogs in a remote area in Colorado, my doctor said it was one of the worst incidents he had heard of, so I still had some residual issues from that. The experience with these police was strongly similar to that attack--which didn't help my condition. They said I had threatened my wife which was a complete fabrication (she is in reality my better half, best friend, and I can't imagine life without her).
One of them said, "What's going on tonight partner?" I told him I wasn't his partner, and I had no idea why they broke in.
The officer who had apparently lead the charge said, "You threatened your wife." I said "What the hell are you talking about? What evidence of that do you have?" He just pointed at his head. I am not kidding. All these people seemed more psychotic than they accused me of being. I was my normal rational self. Anyway, they ordered me on my knees, still only in my boxer shorts. Then, two of them yanked me up by my biceps, pincer like, which gave me deep muscular bruises the next day. I wasn't resisting or putting up a fight at all. They cuffed me behind my back. I really couldn't figure out who I pissed off so bad to treat me this way.
My wife later told me they rummaged through our house, looking for weapons, which we have never had. They kept saying "Where's the gun?" She said, "There is no gun."
As they put me in the back of a marked car (apparently against Kansas statute for treating the mentall ill), I said (stupidly, I guess, but you have to understand I was a little mad), "This is how they got Stephen Biko--in the middle of the night." "Who is that?", one asked. I said "Haven't you ever heard of Apartheid?" "What is that?" "Like Nelson Mandela?" A note in my medical record subsequently read "Raving that he is Nelson Mandela." :)
I guess the details of the tortuous night in hell I went through should be elided somewhat to lessen the trauma to my readers here, but they injected me with antipsychotic drugs at the hospital against my will, faked my wife's signature, refused to give me water or let me go to the bathroom (Geodon makes you thirsty and have to go to the bathroom), put me in 5-point restraints with a spitmask, and kept gaslighting, insulting, and mistreating me and my wife all night. In the morning, I was rubbing my eyes to lessen the headache, and the intern on call asked me "Why are you rubbing your eyes?" Shit, why do you think? She advised me to stay a couple days there, that it would be like a vacation. I politely declined, and they released me with my wallet and other effects the police had removed from my house after rummaging through our belongings. Into a blizzard, which I had to drive home in because my wife was a wreck. When I got home I had to shovel 10 inches of snow from the drive. I went in, we took pictures, and started looking up lawyers and realtors. When the police came back knocking again, we were prepared and able to get them to leav.
We couldn't find a lawyer or mental health agency in Kansas who would believe us and take our case, and even a national search failed. After a few years, I tore up the photograph of the bruises on my bicep as it was too painful to remember. The police report was almost incomprehensible, as most people I showed it to, including lawyers agreed. My medical record said my injuries were due to fighting the police, and my wife's own doctor put a note in hers that said, "This is clearly odd storytelling behavior." The hardware store where we bought replacement locks and hinges remarked, "Them old boys had a good ol' time that night, breaking down your doors, didn't they?" :) The root cause of all this was a next-door neighbor, who I had never met, who kept swatting 911 until LEO came out and decided to have fun. After that, I kept an eye on him, and he was extremely crazy--he let his father who had Alzheimers ride around on a tractor waving his cowboy hat around and driving around in a circle around the bare feet of his grandson's children. The police never did remove him from his home, to my knowledge. I never have really recovered, nor my wife.
That sounds absolutely terrible and something like no person should ever have to go through. I understand the traumatic impact an incident like this could cause a person. Your experience is similar to mine in that once something does happen, its almost like the lawyers and doctors that should be there to protect you act like they can't fathom what you're telling them. Part of me just believes that they are so subscribed to the system that they can't even comprehend that it allows for such abuses. I've seen signs of it in my personal life. I've also had doctors straight up lie about things that were said during behavioral health appointments, and when I confronted them about it they continued to lie and try to gaslight me about it. I guess once you experience an event like that it is much harder to ever go back to trusting people and institutions the same way again.
I'm sorry you had to have any involvement in that morass of a mess too. I've had more friendly interactions with the police in the new state I live in, 1500 miles away--although before that incident I never had any run-ins with the law in Wichita after living there 25 years off and on. Here, my wife and I wave back at them when they drive by.
This isn't the America I grew up in, the one where my parents taught me to trust, but verify authority. It seems like everything in our society is "upside down" these days--I really do want to trust our institutions, we have them for a reason--but the cracks are now canyons and it's easy to slip through. I guess it's trite to say it, but "When they came for the oddball, nebbish computer nerds, I did nothing because I wasn't a..."
Thank you for your sympathetic comments, they did make me feel better for sure, and best wishes.
As I was taking a break from writing that "wall of text" last night, I finished my "Homer's Donut" shape, a 3D torus with a 0 - 360 degree arc to connect pipe-like shapes. My pipe-routing code is almost finished as of this morning.
My parents also taught me to "pick myself up, dust myself off, and start all over again." Peter Tosh too. So I guess another trite quote, "It's hard to innovate when you keep receiving 'being hit over the head' lessons."
As I finished the code for straight-line coil geometry tonight, I thought of an abbreviation for the above story. Take the year it happened, 2014 and subtract 30--(re)read this book:
I think a section of the redacted text on the police report was "Neighbor heard him telling her 'I love you, Julia.'"
It was like living a hyper-realistic version of 1984. "My name is Winston Smith." Except, although I'm sure I can be broken, they didn't accomplish it that time. Our English class read the book 1984 in the year 1984. I read Slave New World, er Brave New World when I was 12--I guess I should have seen this all coming with my advance study of it. Hmm...
That place is down the road from me. I did a photo essay of it, about 13 years ago.
I saw Alan Ginsberg in Brentwood, back around the turn of the century.
The reason he was there, was because his mother had been hospitalized in Pilgrim State (another huge mental asylum -still partly open), and he had been doing some kind of memorial.
