The insanity excuse and retrograde thinking.

• Author: Vatz, Richard E.
• Position: Law & Justice

THOSE OF US WHO have been on the front lines of the more than half-century fight relating to the issue of whether alleged mental illness should be an acceptable legal excuse for felonious behavior periodically have been encouraged and dismayed during that time period.

We have been encouraged when there was a realization by millions of Americans (and others around the world) some 30 years ago that John Hinckley, whatever his socialization peculiarities, intentionally and premeditatedly tried to kill Pres. Ronald Reagan, despite the fact that his plea of insanity was successful.

Yet, we have been dismayed during this same lime period by the apparent persuasiveness of the psychiatric community that, since the insanity plea is invoked and successful in criminal cases only around one percent of the time, there should not be much concern. In this author's writing on persuasion, also the name of a course I have taught for almost 40 years, I have been fighting that powerful--but specious--argument which implies that, when a psychiatric defense is false, there is little problem since it is employed infrequently. However, the fact that the defense's use is relatively infrequent does not mean that its absolute invocation will not constitute thousands of cases.

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One assumes that, when irrationality dominates a policy dispute, there will be a linear movement toward dispensing of the most indefensible components of both sides of the argument. In disputes over mental illness, the critics have, to a large extent, conceded that there is a tiny percent of those mislabeled as "mentally ill" who may have brain disease, and there has been an apposite conceding among many establishment mental health practitioners that, in the area of the insanity plea and beyond, the labeling of "mental illness" often is substantively empty and intended for strategic benefits to those so labeled.

At the same time, there are many in the psychiatric and psychology communities who utterly are impervious to argument and evidence. These are those who promote institutional psychiatry's ever-increasing estimates (now 55% and rising) of individuals who have or will have mental illness, always through nonmedical surveys, not medical exams.

Part of this flat-Earth community is found among the intelligentsia, and this filters down to the media and general population. The consequences range from benign fear of mythical mental illness to the factoring in of imagined...