The Death Penalty And Psychiatric Madness

Commentary Seen at Infoshop News

The January 6 execution of Charles Singleton, who was convicted of homicide and sentenced to death in 1979 in Arkansas, represents a great ethical quandary for psychiatry and its involvement in the criminal justice system, argues Alan A. Stone in a March Psychiatric Times commentary. The perception that Singleton's psychiatrist might have been facilitating an execution by prescribing Singleton psychiatric drugs is a grave ethical issue for Stone and the psychiatric profession. It's worth noting here what Stone doesn't consider to represent an ethical quandary for psychiatry.

Nowhere does Stone feel the need to concede that the power of the state, the State of Arkansas in this case, to coerce a jail inmate to take drugs and, hence, rationalize executing him, is a power that the psychiatric profession, in alliance with the mental health movement, has tirelessly lobbied for. It's coercive psychiatric treatment laws in and of themselves that are unethical. It is the alliance between psychiatry and state that is unethical in and of itself. We wouldn't even be having stupid debates about whether or not a drug can make a defendant understand the charges and proceedings against him if psychiatry wasn't so intertwined with the legal system today.

These issues invariably revolve around the insanity defense, another issue which inspires no debates about ethics among the psychoquacks.

The fact that an obviously guilty criminal defendant, like John Hinckley, can be exonerated for his criminal acts, in part because he says he was trying to impress actress Jodi Foster, does not raise an ethical quandary for psychiatry. When somebody like Hinckley, who committed his crime before many a television camera, copps the insanity plea, he'll find a line of psychoquacks from Seattle to San Francisco willing to testify on his behalf. In mental health law guilty people like Hinckley can be excused when they put up a successful insanity defense.

The fact that people like Hinckley are generally locked up and involuntarily treated is a footnote to this. The fact is they are excused for their actions. Meanwhile, innocent people not charged with crimes can be locked up by way of involuntary civil commitment.

This is the morally bankrupt world of mental health law and it sparks no debates about ethics among psychiatrists.