Free Republic

In 1992, after he stopped wearing clothes to his UC Berkeley classes, Andrew Martinez was something of a walking only-in-Berserkeley joke as the campus' own Naked Guy. But his life was no laughing matter. Around 1997, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. In 2003, he was arrested for assaulting a staff member at a halfway house where he was a resident. He spent the next 21/2 years in Santa Clara County jail, its acute psychiatric unit, Napa and Atascadero state hospitals - until at age 33, he killed himself by suffocating himself with a plastic bag in a jail cell on...

Santa Clara County agrees to pay $1 million in lawsuit over Naked Guy's suicide To many, Luis Andrew Martinez was simply the Naked Guy — a Berkeley fixture who gained national notoriety in the 1990s for refusing to wear clothes. About 10 years later, on May 18, 2006, isolated and alone in a Santa Clara County Jail cell, Martinez — a diagnosed schizophrenic — tied a plastic bag around his head and killed himself. Today — on the third anniversary of his death — lawyers for his family plan to announce a $1 million settlement reached with Santa Clara County,...

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All of the people in the four pictures below are men - on Transgender Lobby Day last Tuesday, April 7! If this bill passes, it will be a crime to make any critical comments on this. In fact, this very report could be considered criminal "hate speech" punishable by up to a year in jail and a fine.

She never revealed mental illness to officials; it’s difficult to screen in hiring SOUTH BEND — It may still puzzle the public as to why a substitute teacher sat and watched as an eighth-grade classroom play-fought at Dickinson Intermediate Center two weeks ago. A student caught the scene on video for seven minutes and posted it to the Internet site YouTube.com. On the video, you hear students giggling as they jostle each other around. The video has since been removed. The Tribune has since learned the substitute lives in a local home for people with chronic mental illness. The residents...

On several forums and blogs such a freerepublic, there have been debates about civil commitment and expanding laws and state hospitals and hospital psyche wards. What is disturbing is that many, even Conservatives and libertarians are more than willing to sacrifice civil liberties and safeguards against government tyranny to clear the streets of the homeless mentally ill and other similar individuals. But the truth is that there is on the books in nearly every state, provisions that allow the involuntary commitment of those who are unable to care for themselves due to so called mental illnesses that they suffer from...

Video of the Goreacle speaking in Germany this past week.

Talk about a puff piece, this Associated Press short is a story with absolutely no substance. Not only that but after seeing the headline and then reading the story, one is hard pressed to believe they belong together. This Amy Forliti puffery is incongruously headlined "Protesters expected to transform the streets outside GOP convention into marketplace of ideas," yet there isn't any discussion at all of any such "marketplace" or about any real "ideas" in the story. In fact, the only "ideas" are ages old, stale and losing their grip among more Americans everyday. Oh, Forliti talks about protests filled...

The day James Anthony Williams allegedly stabbed to death a stranger on Capitol Hill, the homeless, mentally ill ex-convict showed up at his probation officer's office agitated, defensive and, the officer wrote, "barely able to hold himself together." Despite intense concerns about Williams' paranoid schizophrenia and violent behavior, the probation officer gave Williams a pair of Metro bus tickets and told him to come back in three days.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Congress, prodded by the deadliest shooting rampage in modern American history, passed legislation on Wednesday designed to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill. Without objection, the Senate and House of Representatives approved the measure, which would bolster background checks for gun buyers, and sent it to President George W. Bush to sign.

Television talk-show host Montel Williams threatened to find and "blow up" the homes of three Savannah Morning News reporters Friday while he was in town promoting free prescriptions for poor people. ...snip... "As we were preparing to film, Montel walked up with his bodyguard and got in Courtney Scott's face pointing his finger telling her, 'Don't look at me like that. Do you know who I am? I'm a big star, and I can look you up, find where you live and blow you up,' " Cosey said. "At this time he was pointing randomly at all of us." "He...

The mentally ill, anti-American Communist disrupted a 9/11 celebration at SF State. SF has been infected by the illness and we should start thinking of ways to take away the power these leftist have. See video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZMgIKZUvFQ

BUILDING boss Howard Shelley carried out the ultimate DIY conversion — by CASTRATING himself so he could become a woman. The 42-year-old dad of two decided on the drastic move after being told he would have to wait at least two years for a sex change on the NHS. He found a website which gave a step-by-step guide to the eye-watering home surgery, then waited till wife Janet went out before setting to work with a kitchen knife in the loo. With the job done, he wrapped his severed appendages in a cloth and dropped them in the bin. Then...

MURMANSK, Russia - Heavy sedatives keep Larisa Arap languishing in a woozy haze at a mental asylum, the victim not of a troubled mind, her family says, but of a Soviet-era practice that continues to muzzle and punish dissent in today's Russia. Earlier this summer, Arap, an activist with former chess champion Garry Kasparov's opposition movement, co-wrote an article that alleged abusive practices at local psychiatric clinics. When Arap appeared at a Murmansk clinic to pick up a routine medical certificate July 5, a doctor called police and had her taken to a local asylum. The doctors handling Arap's case...

In the 16th century, London’s mentally ill were often kept at Bethlem Royal Hospital. The conditions inside the hospital were notoriously poor. Patients were often chained to the floor and the noise was so great that Bethlem was more likely to drive a man crazy than to cure him. The conditions were so infamous that the nickname locals gave the hospital—Bedlam—has come to mean any scene of great confusion. Unfortunately five hundred years later, we’re still treating the mentally ill more like prisoners than patients. Fifty years ago, more than 550 thousand people were institutionalized in public mental hospitals. Today,...

I was in graduate school, studying clinical psychology when they began shutting down the asylums. The place was California, the time was the early 1970s, and "they" were an unprecedented confederation of progressives, libertarians and fiscal conservatives. ... The best predictor of future violent behavior is past violent behavior, yet we regularly grant parole to murderers, serial rapists, chronically assaultive individuals and habitual pedophiles. Even when we do attempt to segregate low-impulse multiple offenders with effective tools such as with three-strikes laws, liberationist clamor never ceases. Talk to anyone who's tried to commit a dangerously violent child or parent for...

WASHINGTON -- Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Thursday that laws should be strengthened to prevent the mentally ill from buying guns. Cho Seung-Hui, the gunman who shot 32 people at Virginia Tech Monday before killing himself, had a history of mental health problems but still was able to buy two guns that he used in the rampage. "If we know that he got mental health services, then there should be some way of preventing somebody like that from buying any kind of weapon," Obama said in an interview on "The Steve Harvey Morning Show," syndicated on radio stations nationwide....

LARGO, Fla. — Steve Stanton professed his love for the city and asked the people of Largo to support his decision to undergo a sex change and allow him to keep his $140,000-a-year job as city manager. To his sorrow, the answer came back no. Almost 500 people packed City Hall on Tuesday night for a special meeting to decide if they would accept someone named Susan instead of Steve as their top official. And while many spoke eloquently in his defense, more called for his ouster. "If Jesus was here tonight, I can guarantee you he'd want him terminated,"...

WASHINGTON -- GLOBAL WARMING is “unequivocal,” according to the just-released report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The most likely culprits are people — all of us. Yet, apart from insightful comments by former Vice President Al Gore, there has never been much public discussion about the role of human population growth in global warming. Prof. Tim Dyson, of the London School of Economics indicates that a 40 percent cut by 2050 in per-capita carbon emissions in the developed world could be completely cancelled by population growth. It’s time to open a “second front” in the battle against global...

Saint Petersburg -- A judge threatened to jail the head of the state Department of Children & Families if the agency can't explain why it consistently has failed to get mentally ill jail inmates into psychiatric treatment. Under Florida law, jail inmates found incompetent to stand trial must be turned over to the agency and placed into treatment within 15 days. An assistant public defender in Miami, Carlos Martinez, said the average wait time had spiked to more than two months, and his office and public defenders in Broward and Hillsborough counties have filed court motions to force DCF to...