Be careful what you ask for:
“In the Soviet Union, psychiatry was sometimes used for punitive purposes. Psychiatric hospitals were used by the authorities as prisons in order to isolate hundreds or thousands of political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally; as such they are considered a form of torture. This method was also employed against religious prisoners, including especially well-educated former atheists who adopted a religion; in such cases their religious faith was determined to be a form of mental illness that needed to be cured...”
The system set up in most US states is supposed to embody the checks and balances needed to prevent such a scenario, such as mandatory court review, but when the Constitution is going all to hell anything can happen.
Oh, I’m the last one to defend psychiatry; I remember years ago I had a professor who was in the business for 20 years say that it was bunk, a never-ending money machine.
I’m just digging around because that Sheriff sounds like he’s deflecting from something; LE typically sticks right to their job in these things and is very methodical in what they say and don’t say to the press so they succeed at the case. I’ve heard of attorney’s grandstanding, but this deflection doesn’t smell right for the LE investigation.
And I found that for years this Arnold v. Sarn case has been turning AZ’s mental health system on its’ head. The AZ mental health system, if one surfs the web it, turns out to be a disaster waiting to happen. They actually just received an OK from the court to halt all their “reform” efforts because of budget problems.
It seems interesting that somehow Arnold v. Sarn has not gotten tied to the media coverage of this murder case. It’s like the media is just hoping that the national media does not pick up Arnold v. Sarn.
I think it all points out that after spending millions of dollars on mental health and having court-supervised improvement to their system, we have Loughner slip right through and never sent over to get run through the system. It’s just a shame that they did not refer him. They have many patients in the system, 24-7 phone support, the whole nine yards. Who knows if the system would have helped him, but how unfortunate he was never even referred. I wonder if there was a legal requirement at any point to refer him ?