How close are we to a Psychiatric Police State?

I like to watch Law & Order. Well… I shouldn’t say “like.” I choose to watch Law & Order because I consider it a decent bellwether on the culture’s tolerance for police misconduct. Often I find myself screaming at the TV when I watch it. The suspects in this show almost never assert their rights. They talk when they don’t have to. They consent to searches when they shouldn’t. If they do assert their rights the cops punish them for it, essentially regarding non cooperation as a confession. And the cops blatantly lie to trick people into cooperating.

The cops on the show also conspire to violate the suspect’s rights. This is most common in the show’s sub series ”Special Victims Unit” which deals with sexual based offenses. In this show the cops regularly violate the medical and psychiatric privacy of suspects and victims, and if they encounter any push back whatsoever it is quickly dismissed with a trite “what about the children” argument.

So it leaves me wondering, as the State incessantly encroaches on medical services, especially psychiatric services, how close are we to complete transparency between police and mental health professionals?

When they rounded up former Marine Brandon Raub for posting anti-government song lyrics on Facebook they didn’t charge him with any criminal offense. They called it a “psychiatric detention” which meant they could force him to take psychiatric medication.

When Bradly Manning was apprehended he was psychologically healthy, but after months of what many have called psychological torture, he was classified as a suicide risk.

This is a straight up Soviet tactic. If it’s legitimate to abridge the rights of someone classified as psychotic, they’ll simply define dissent as psychotic.

New York Governor,  Andrew Cuomo, along with a bipartisan cartel of legislators, is championing gun bad legislation to require psychiatrists to snitch on their patients to law-enforcement in order to restrict them from owning a weapon.

Psychiatrists will have to report patients classified as “potentially harmful to themselves or others” so their guns can be confiscated. Sounds reasonable, but consider the word “potentially.” These aren’t convicted criminals. These aren’t even defendants accused of a crime. This is “potential” crime, pre-crime… in other words thought-crime.

When you consider all the kids who come out of the public school system on psychiatric medication, meaning they’ve undergone psychiatric evaluations, one has to wonder how many teenagers are going to saddled with this diagnosis simply because they play violent video games, or listen to emo music, and will have to wear that misdiagnosis like a scarlet letter into adulthood.

This would mean a comprehensive data base, accessible by law-enforcement, of “problematic” patients who can be deprived of natural rights with no due process. Is there a way off this list? Doubtful.

What’s worse is it puts a chilling effect on the delicate relationship between the patient and the health provider, which requires trust and confidentiality. If a desperate person knows that telling a doctor or a psychiatrist that they are angry or depressed could potentially put them into a law-enforcement database containing their medical history you can bet they’re not going to seek the help they need. That means more angry, depressed people who can’t cope. That means more potential violent outbursts.

There’s that word again, “potential.”

I would like to suggest that the State itself, with all it’s guns and paper money, are a “potential harm to itself and others.” As such, according to its own standards, it should probably be disarmed and heavily medicated.

Of course, if patients do the predictable thing, and stop cooperating with their own psychological evaluations, the State has an answer for that too. 5150 is the police scanner code for an involuntary psychological hold. It refers to a section of the California Welfare and Institutions Code which allows an officer to apprehend and confine a person deemed to have a mental disorder that makes them… wait for it… “potentially harmful to themselves or others.”

There’s that word again.

So what happens when the sociocrats in New York who think psychiatrist should be able to abridge a patient’s natural rights for thought-crime, and the sociocrats in California who think a police officer can make that decision get together?

Well the answer is simple. Police will have the authority to classify suspects as psychotics leaving them free to detain them, confiscate their property, and browse their medical history at their pleasure. The lowly beat cop will have to power to classify dissent as psychosis, with all the legal ramifications that implies. How long before a cop pulls you over for texting, demands to see your phone, checks your Facebooks and Twitter apps and declares you “potentially harmful to themselves or others.” Poof! Mandatory psychiatric evaluation. Mandatory psychiatric drugs.

What if all it takes is your bumper stickers?

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