AND THEY CALL THEM INSANE!

In the early 70s, a group of eight people--three women and five men--checked into the emergency rooms of 12 separate psychiatric hospitals and said that they heard voices telling them "empty", "hollow", or "thud".  All eight of them were admitted to the hospital with diagnoses of schizophrenia, except one who was diagnosed with bipolar.

 

Once in the hospital, all of these patients behaved completely normally and reported that they had no more symptoms.  Still it took from 7 to 52 days for them to be released.  As a condition of their release, they were all required to admit that they had a mental illness and that they would take anti-psychotic medication in order to control that illness. 

 

As it turned out, none of these folks had a mental illness.  They were all volunteers in an experiment conducted by Dr. David Rosenhan in order to test the validity of psychiatric diagnoses.  One was a graduate student in his twenties, three were psychologists, and there was a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, a painter and a housewife. 

 

Once the results of this experiment came out, the doctors at these hospitals cried foul and said that the test was unfair, so Dr. Rosenhan agreed to do it again with one specific hospital.  This time he warned the hospital to expect that fake patients would again attempt admittance to its facility.  In the weeks that followed, the staff at the hospital confidently identified 41 out the 193 patients that it had evaluated as fake patients. 

 

As it turned out, Dr. Rosenhan hadn't sent anyone to the facility at all. 

 

The results of this study made it clear how difficult it is to distinguish between the sane and the insane, particularly within the context of a hospital emergency room where staff members are approaching patients with specific expectations. 

 

Ironically, even though none of the staff members in the first experiment identified the fake patients, several of the patients at these hospitals expressed their doubts suggesting that the fake patients were researchers or journalists investigating the hospitals. 

 

The results of this study were published by Dr. David Rosenhan in 1973 in an article entitled "Being Sane in Insane Places." 

 

While the study remains controversial within the mental health profession, no one has been able to successfully refute its conclusions.  Put twenty five different psychiatrists in a room with a patient, and you are likely to obtain as many diagnoses of that patient as you have psychiatrists. 

 

This is why it is particularly troubling that the Connecticut Judicial Branch allows Judges and attorneys to use fabricated mental health assessments to trash the reputations of litigants and use them as the basis for denying them access to their children.   Many of these litigants have never had a diagnosis before they stepped into a courtroom. 

 

I observed this happening in Susan Skipp's case recently.  The trial court had heard expert testimony from Ms. Skipp's psychiatrist that she had PTSD from the legal abuse which she was experiencing as a result of her divorce. 

 

Ordinarily, any conclusion the Court draws about litigants in court arises from the evidence provided at trial through expert testimony or documents which provide corroborating information.  In Susan Skipp's situation, Judge Lynda Munro without any evidentiary basis whatsoever arbitrarily disregarded the testimony about Ms. Skipp's PTSD and wrote a Memorandum of Decision which broadly hinted that Ms. Skipp had some other, unnamed mental health condition that still needed to be diagnosed. 

 

This is something that Judge Munro invented from her own mind.  Yet, Munro is not a psychiatrist and has no professional qualifications to diagnose anyone with a mental health condition.  If she had concerns that Susan Skipp had some unidentified mental health condition, she had the opportunity to ask that question of the expert witnesses which the attorney made available during the four days of trial, but she did not. 

 

Instead, Judge Lynda Munro took the opportunity to smear Ms. Skipps reputation counting upon her judicial immunity as a means to get away with doing so. 

 

Subsequently, the Judge continued on the use this unnamed mental health illness, about which there was no evidence presented at trial, as the basis for denying Ms. Skipp access to her children. 

 

In a similar case which I observed recently, another friend who will remain anonymous--let's call him "Joe" was also subjected to this Judge initiated pseudo-psychiatry. 

 

Joe had provided an expert witness from out of state to testify to the effect that Joe did not have a mental illness.  Instead of accepting this testimony, the Judge in the case refused to consider it  valid because it came from a mental health professional from out of state.  Tell me, what did the Judge think happens?  Mental Health Professionals from, say, New Jersey, lose their professional expertise and intelligence as soon as they cross the border into Connecticut?  That doesn't say much about any of the professions in the field of mental health if their body of knowledge cannot be translated from one State to another!  

 

Be that as it may, having decided that an out of state mental health professional is incapable of providing an accurate assessment of my friend, Joe, the Judge went on to declare that Joe had a mental health disability; he isn't sure what it is, and what it consists of, but surely an in-state professional could figure it out.  Further, the Judge's decision was that Joe would be restricted to supervised visitation until the diagnosis could be figured out.  

 

Another way that you could interpret the discussion in Joe's case is that the Court was only willing to have a mental health professional provide testimony if he was in-state and affiliated with the Judge and the Opposing Attorney so the latter could influence the result of the psychological evaluation.  If true, this calls into question the integrity of any mental health professional who would allow factors outside the evaluation itself, (i.e. friendship with the judge or other attorneys) to affect his or her determination of a particular person's diagnosis.   

 

As with Susan and "Joe", I can name case after case where judges and attorneys have hinted at unnamed mental health conditions to gain advantage in a case, or to have their own way, independent of the facts of the case. 

 

This is not the first time in history where people in positions of power have sought to maintain and expand their authority by accusing their opponents of insanity.  Nazi Germany comes to mind, Russia and its Eastern European Allies; the People's Republic of China during the era of Mao Zedong.  Women, particularly intelligent women, have been victimized by false accusations of insanity for doing such things as fighting for the right to vote or demanding an education.  And don't forget the notorious diagnosis of drapetomania, invented in 1851 by Samuel A. Cartwright to describe a mental illness which caused slaves to run away from their bondage. 

 

Even if there were any validity to a diagnosis of mental illness, why is a mental health disability or any disability for that matter used as a means to deny a person access to their children or due process of law?  Wasn't the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 and the Americans With Disabilities Amendments Act of 2008 implemented with the intention of eliminating discrimination on the basis of disability? 

If a person has a disability as determined by Family Court, either a physical or mental disability, shouldn't the question be what reasonable modifications does that person require in order to fulfill his or her role as a parent--not how can we immediately strip that person of all his or her civil rights and constitutional rights without any further investigation.  Why is there such a powerful knee jerk reaction of condemnation and rejection simply as the result of a label.  If a person who has blindness or a person who has deafness can still be a parent, why not a person with mental illness.  What's the difference?

 

More than any other, an attorney's accusation that a particular litigant has some form of mental illness is the most harmful and damaging one out there.  Why is that so?  Because it appeals to society's most basic prejudices towards people with mental illness, to such concepts that people with mental illness are subhuman monsters capable of any kind of violence and degradation, that they are incapable of taking care of themselves and that they are intellectually damaged beyond repair and incapable of rudimentary thought and insight.  Many people believe that any kind of deception and misrepresentation is acceptable to practice against a person who has a mental illness because they believe that someone with a mental health label should have no rights. 

 

With such widespread and prevalent attitudes of hatred towards those with mental illness, particularly after the Sandy Hook incident, trashing a person by calling them crazy has to be the easiest way to achieve the goal of destroying the opposing party in a custody trial. 

 

At the same time such practices are morally and spiritually repugnant in that they stigmatize, marginalize, silence, and deny justice to one fifth of the population in our State, and it is done with the support of the moral equivalent of the KKK when it comes to mental health disabilities, i.e. the Connecticut Judicial Branch, the Connecticut Bar Association, judges, attorneys, family services personnel, clerks, and other employees who work for our family courts all of whom buy into the false, bigoted premise that people with mental health disabilities should not be allowed any of the kinds of legal rights which are routinely accorded to citizens of Connecticut who do not have a label.  From what I have personally observed, bigoted attitudes like this are common among those who work in the legal field and accepted uncritically.  This is wrong and it has to stop--now.

As a final thought, it is worth considering: 

If Abraham Lincoln were alive today, he would probably be denied custody of his children.  He had frequent bouts of clinical depression.

Ludwig Van Beethoven was involved in a custody dispute regarding his nephew Karl and won.  Were he in Family Court in Connecticut today, he might not gain custody because he is thought to have had bipolar disorder.

Many average citizens have mental health disorders; they ride to work on the same buses that you do, pay taxes, get college degrees, and go to Church.  They do not have horns.  Isn't it time for Court personnel and family court attorneys to acknowledge that this is true and stop demonizing innocent people.