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"Extract from the draft of an appeal to the Tenth Circuit
41. Considering that people with mental illnesses have long been treated with fear and loathing out of all rational proportion to their actual and minimal threat, even before the Salem witch trials, the Plaintiff intends to challenge the entire manner how people with mental illnesses have been treated within and without the law, legally and extra-legally. Despite over 30 years of medical and legal research to the contrary, our legal system has based its treatment of people with mental illnesses on the presumed basis of a higher level of “dangerousness”, pretending that this is not the same as a presumption of guilt, even though the consequences to and deprivations of civil liberties are much the same. Even though the rate of violence among people with mental illness is only slightly higher than the general population, limited mostly to those with a prior history of violence and substance abuse, and even though research has shown 30 years ago that clinical prediction of violent behavior is less accurate than one in two, more often like one in three, our legal system has allowed such “expert testimony” to destroy the civil liberties of any person with any mental illness, no matter the lack of any significant history of violence, both temporarily and permanently.
42. See “The Clinical Prediction of Violent Behavior”, John Monahan, circa 1979-1980, National Institute of Mental Health and Jason Aronson, Inc., 134 p (amazon.com). See “Psychiatric Disabilities, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the New Workplace Violence Account”, Vicki A. Laden and Gregory Schwartz, Berkeley Journal of Employment & Labor Law, Vol 21(246-270), circa 2000, available on the Internet. See The MacArthur Foundation Risk Assessment Study, circa 2001-2005, on the Internet. See Chapter 5, Psychiatric Disabilities and the ADA, of “Sharing the Dream: Is the ADA Accommodating All?”, a report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights which was product of a two-day hearing conducted by the Commission on November 12–13, 1998, was available at http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/ada/ch5.htm). See “Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit” by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, circa 1996 (amazon.com).
If nothing else, these sources will demonstrate that the only consistently and truly violent people with mental illnesses are those that have already been violent, especially those who abuse drink and drugs.
43. For example, in ADDINGTON V. TEXAS, 441 U. S. 418 (1979) the High Court stated, “The reasonable doubt standard is inappropriate in civil commitment proceedings because, given the uncertainties of psychiatric diagnosis, it may impose a burden the state cannot meet, and thereby erect an unreasonable barrier to needed medical treatment. The state should not be required to employ a standard of proof that may completely undercut its efforts to further the legitimate interests of both the state and the patient that are served by civil commitments.” It did so without consideration of the 228 references, from 1922 to 1980, cited by Monahan in “The Clinical Prediction of Violent Behavior”. And without consideration Prof. Monahan’s finding of the terrible inaccuracy of such predictions, that would wrongly condemn as many as two out of every three persons found “guilty” of the likelihood of future violence due to mental illness, by the use of the standard of “clear and convincing evidence” in actual psychiatric practice. It may not be quite as bad as throwing an alleged and tied up witch into a pond to see if the water rejects her, but if this Court of Appeals cannot reconsider such matters at its level, it may at least pass them on to the Supreme Court.
44. There is also the matter of who actually needs and benefits from the “treatment”, the captive, involuntary patients, or the doctors and facilities who find it necessary for their continued profit and employment. The High Court has not adequately addressed the matter of how many and badly innocent people are damaged by these presumptions, processes and “treatments”. This, despite many cases and decades of scandal, abuse and outright abduction of vulnerable people for profit.
45. Even though some mental illnesses cannot often be reliably distinguished from traumatic brain injury (http://www.npr.org/2012/02/20/147058173/army-moves-to-act-fast-on-battlefield-brain-injuries; Note: Oklahoma Mental Health Code, OSC Title 43A, specifically excludes the effects of traumatic brain injury from considerations for involuntary commitment.), our legal system has treated people with mental illness to a double standard: lower standards of evidence and higher standards of scrutiny than even for murderers, gang-bangers, drug dealers and child molesters. Where it is said in criminal law that ten guilty men should go free lest one innocent man be convicted, the practice in mental health law effectively commits two innocent people to get the third, on the basis of what they are thinking and are suspected of being capable of doing in the future. Or because they have few advocates, and those involved in their “treatment” are often frightened of lawsuits after future violence. Even the Supreme Court has indicated that it is permissible to coerce people with mental illnesses into incriminating themselves without counsel, despite the fact that many innocent people in serious criminal investigations do the same thing, without the extra trauma and stress to which people with mental illnesses are subject and vulnerable.
46. Our legal system has long treated mental illness as if it was all one thing, like a surgeon performing the same radical excision on every cancer from benign prostate tumors to raging incurable melanoma. Despite all scandals and forcible commitments for insurance scams, it has pretended that “treatment” is not the same as punishment. Even when that “treatment” is no better than Harry Potter being locked under his relatives’ stairs, or similar to micro-management by an evil mother-in-law. Such double standards, depicting people with mental illnesses as those who don’t deserve the same legal rights and protections as others, have encouraged such agencies as the Tulsa Police Department to refrain from full and fair investigations, in order to achieve an arrest, and jurists such as Tulsa City and County Mental Health Court Judge Theresa Dreiling, in concert with the mental health section of the Public Defender’s Office, the District Attorney and such facilities as the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health, to short-circuit the due process protections of even a prejudiced Mental Health Code to achieve and maintain a commitment.
47. These issues, as was the 1857 Dred Scott Decision, need to be reviewed at all levels up to the Highest Court. "
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