When a government wants to isolate those they perceive as a threat to the status quo, forceful involuntary incarceration is the tool they use. If it’s an armed rebel or a violent insurrectionist, they haul the offender off to prison in the dark of night. Problem solved.

     But what if the threat is more a perceived transgression against the social “mores” of the society…like being gay or “odd” or peculiarly obsessive about something or other?

     Involuntary psychiatric incarceration can also solve that social problem.

     Labeling someone with a mental disorder in America today can allow them to be locked up against their will without any immediate recourse to defend themselves. For them to be deprived of their legal rights in such a way requires an explicit or implicit legal order by a psychiatrist or one acting to enforce a standard psychiatric diagnosis.

     The Soviet Union has long used a psychiatric label to justify the removal of a non-compliant individual from their well controlled society. By the nineteen-seventies the Soviet government had established a system of psychiatric hospitals to label and remove from society those they considered a threat, political or otherwise. Psychiatric incarceration was publically seen as a more “politically correct” means of removing a citizen than shipping him off to an isolated gulag in the middle of Siberia.

     To accomplish that “legal” incarceration, Russian psychiatrists came up with a politically convenient new diagnosis of mental disorder. “Sluggish schizophrenia” or “reformist delusions” were coined by psychiatrist in a way similar to American psychiatrists voting on a diagnosis for their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

     When a psychiatrist labeled a Soviet citizen with one of those new “mental disorders,” the Serbski Institute for Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow would, among others, incarcerate them against their will and easily make them disappear from the world.

     Communist China solved their problem of social “misfits” in a similar psychiatric manner. After the death of Mao Tse Tung, it became increasingly difficult to remove misfits from society by using strictly legal means. A psychiatric label was then used to forcefully incarcerate Chinese citizens in one of the twenty newly constructed psychiatric institutions that still exist in China today and that are still used for the same purpose.

      Anyone who threatens what the Chinese government might call their “social cohesion” can be labeled by a psychiatrist as insane. As in Russia, psychiatrists in China created a new mental disease, “culture bound disorder,” for this involuntary commitment to a psychiatric institution. The Chinese government and psychiatrists used their new diagnosis, for instance, to incarcerate thousands of members of Falun Gong because of their religious beliefs, which were considered a threat to an ordered Chinese society.

     None of that could happen in America, though…could it?

     The sad fact is that since the nineteen-eighties, Big Parma’s massive psychiatric marketing campaign has made it appear that much of the country’s population is suffering from depression or anxiety, diagnosed or undiagnosed. Consequently, the forced removal of troublesome individuals through involuntary incarceration in a psychiatric unit by labeling them with a mental disorder has been made legal.

     Few question the activity. It is, after all, supposedly used to protect an individual from harming himself or others. Because of Big Pharma’s attempt to brainwash the public into thinking that mental illness is such a prevalent “disorder,” however, involuntary psychiatric incarceration has not much been questioned as a potential danger to the individual freedoms guaranteed in this country.

     Laws for involuntary psychiatric incarceration — such as Florida’s Baker Ac t — now exist in all states. They permit the involuntary commitment of people with psychiatric “disorders” who are either dangerous to themselves or others or are gravely disabled.  The person can be held for as long as they pose that risk. 

     In some jurisdictions laws like Laura’s Law and Kendra’s Law have been passed authorizing court-ordered, forced ingestion of psychiatric drugs for those with “chronic, untreated severe mental illness.”

     Silenced by psychotropic drugs, they are no longer a threat.

     The rate of involuntary psychiatric detentions has increased sharply over the past two decades. In 2014 the rate of emergency involuntary detentions was 357 per 100,000 people.

     Today the rate of involuntary psychiatric incarceration in the United States ranges from 29 per 100,000 in Connecticut up to 966 per 100,000 in Florida. 
 
     Certainly, there are people who temporarily need to be restrained to protect others or themselves from erratic violent behavior.

     However, the way these laws now read opens the door to such arbitrary application – not to mention the underlying arbitrary psychiatric “disorders” they’re based on – that an injustice can all too easily be done.
See our news this month about the case of one unfortunate Connecticut woman.