SUICIDE, NOBLE AND IGNOBLE

Voluntary euthanasia or assisted suicide was the first political issue I ever cared deeply about (the right to abortion being the second). I was ten or eleven when I saw the 1962 film The Interns, in which an aspiring doctor, played as I recall by Cliff Robertson, ends the life of a man with a terminal and painful illness, who wants to die. For this he is deprived of his internship. I can still recall turning to my mother and asking, "Mommy, why are they mad at him? He didn't do anything wrong." I could not understand-- it seemed so unjust. Fifty-seven years later, the incomprehension and indignation remain as strong as ever. My rage at the opponents of voluntary euthanasia is increased by the way that proponents of the spiritual murder called ECT or electroconvulsive treatment use the threat of that a patient may commit suicide as an argument. But suicide is not always the rash impulse of a disordered mind. It can be an admirable act of courage. Indeed, such suicides have a long and venerable history throughout the world.

At the beginning of the fourth century BCE, the first prominent individualist in history, Socrates, was accused of "corrupting the morals" of Athenian youth by his argumentative debates, and sentenced to death by drinking hemlock. As he held the honorable status of Athenian citizen, he was however allowed the opportunity to escape into exile. In Plato's Crito, Socrates is depicted giving his reasons for accepting the death sentence-- that someone who has enjoyed the benefits of living under a government of law must abide by it even when the sentence is unjust, because the injustice was the error of men, not the law. This has become the foundation of our own tradition of civil disobedience, or non-violent protest. Althugh civil disobedience only makes sense in a government under law, which our nation is fast ceasing to be, for the person still fortunate enough to live in a democracy, the argument would be unanswerable and Socrates' choice of death was surely a well-considered and noble one.

Similarly, the founding of the Roman Republic was inspired by a suicide, that of Lucretia, who in the sixth century B.C. was raped by the son of the Tarquin king of Rome. According to Livy, Lucius Junius Brutus, her kinsman, grabbed the dagger from her breast and and declared war on the Tarquins. After assassinating the king, he had the Romans swear an oath that they should never again allow themselves to be ruled by kings. His descendent Marcus Junius Brutus, who is immortalized by Shakespeare as the "noblest Roman of them all", was in fact far less noble, because after the assassination he refused to sign a statement declaring Caesar to have been a tyrant in order to keep the office he had been awarded by Caesar as urban praetor. Between this and the servility of the general population, who loved Caesar for providing them with "bread and circuses", the Roman Republic was doomed. But some good men lived on. The letters of Pliny the Younger reveal the high regard in which people who committed suicide for noble reasons were held. While Pliny recognized and regretted that some people committed suicide purely on upon impulse, he praises those take their lives for good reason, as, for instance, and incurable and painful illness. His greatest hero in this regard is Arria, wife of Caecina Paetus.

When Lucius Arruntius Camillus Scribonianus led a rebellion against the Emperor Claudius in 42 CE with the intention of restoring the Republic, Caecina Paetus joined him. Scribonius was killed and Paetus was taken to Rome as a prisoner for conspiring with him. Arria attacked the wife of the leader of the rebellion for giving evidence to the prosecution, crying, "Am I to listen to you, who could go on living after Scribonius died in your arms?" After Paetus was ordered to commit suicide for his rebellion, Arria determined to join him. This should not be viewed as an expression of guilt or shame for their part in the rebellion, as Shakespeare depicts the conspirators in the assassination of Julius Caesar as feeling when they committed suicide-- rather it was an act akin to Socrates decision to drink the hemlock. When Arria's friends and relatives begged her not to take her own life, she said, according to Pliny, "You are wasting your time, for you can ensure me a coward's death, but you cannot prevent me from dying." With these words, she lept up from her chair, and ran into the wall opposite, knocking herself out and illustrating what she would do if her family were to deny her the easier means of killing herself afforded by a dagger. When her husband Paetus showed reluctance to take his own life, she herself unsheathed the dagger, pierced her own breast, and extracting it, handed it to her husband, declaring, "Non dolet, Paete!" ("Paetus, it doesn't hurt!"). These were lauded by Pliny as "immortal, almost godlike words" (Letters, Book III:16, pp. 75-76 of Oxford World Classics).

Outside the West, Japanese tradition also held suicide to be honorable in certain circumstances. Seppuku was the act of a noble samurai, performed if possible in a ritual setting, or if not on the battlefield (it was not so painful as one would think, for as soon as the person slit his belly, a second, or kaishaku, beheaded him. Women were permitted to die by simply slitting their throats). Sometimes Japanese lords or shoguns, such as the cruel Nobunaga and Hideoyoshi, ordered their vassals to commit suicide for no good reason. But on other occasions, seppuku was the route freely and rationally chosen by the samurai. One good reason was when one was faced with the choice of disobeying the lord to which one had pledged loyalty or doing something that one considered dishonorable. Another was defeat at the hands of a cruel enemy, who one knew would not permit one an honorable death. Finally, the Japanese, like Socrates, would commit seppuku if they violated the law, even if it was for a good reason. The famous tale of the Forty-Seven Ronin, or Chushingura, reveals the Japanese attitude both toward the assassination of an evil official and the decision to die. In the eighteenth century, the young Lord Asano of Ako Province was insulted by a Tokugawa bureaucrat, Kira, because he would not bribe him. In response he drew his sword in the shogunal palace, an unpardonable offense, and tried to kill Kira. Although he only succeeded in wounding him, he was sentenced to commit seppuku.

Dozens of Lord Asano's retainers, led by his chief retainer Oishi Kuranosuke, they secretly swore to avenge him and assassinate Kira. For years, they deliberately concealed their intentions in order to throw Kira off-guard. Then one snowy night, by pre-arrangment they descended upon Kira's mansion in Edo and overcame his guards. Finding the cowardly Kira hiding in a closet, Kuranosuke offered him the opportunity to choose an honorable death by seppuku. When he refused, Kuranosuke beheaded him. After offering his head to the gods at the temple of Sengaku-ji, the Forty-Seven turned themselves in in full recognition of what this would mean. Despite their immense popularity among the population of Edo, they were all sentenced to commit seppuku, a sentence which they accepted as calmly as Socrates accepted his. It should be noted that although the Tokugawa Regime was probably the most tyrannical which Japan had ever experienced, it did not torture the Forty-Seven or force them to "confess" that they were wrong, but permitted them an honorable death. In this respect, it showed itself far more civilized than our own present government. It is regrettable to see that Fumon Tanaka, in his otherwise excellent book, Samurai Fighting Arts: The Theory and Practice, has capitulated to Western prejudices to such an extent that he quite nonsensically denies that seppuku is suicide! (p. 48) Similarly, when a petition was circulating in California to permit voluntary euthanasia for the terminally ill, although I signed it, I was highly offended by a clause which denied that the act was suicide, as if suicide were something shameful.

And then, in Europe, the dark ages began. Centuries of domination by Christianity brought suicide into disrepute. The Church wanted people to believe that there was no escape from its tyranny and so it preached that suicide was sin and would condemn the person to hell, itself an invention of tyrannical minds (whether or not the Bible forbids suicide is irrelevant to those who, like myself, are neither Jewish nor Christian, and also to the laws of the United States, whose Constitution enjoins the separation of church and state). In the nineteenth century, psychiatrists replaced priests as buttresses of tyranny and declared suicide to be "sick", a modern variation upon the notion of "sinful". But some progress toward reason began to be made in places such as Switzerland, Scandinavia, and the United States in the late twentieth century. In the nineteen-seventies, the heretical psychiatrist Thomas Szasz wrote: "The individualistic position is that a person's life belongs to himself. Thus he has the right to take his own life, that is, to commit suicide... the medical-psychiatric position on suicide... ends in extolling mental health and survival over every other value, particularly liberty. In regarding the desire to live, but not the desire to die, as a legitimate human aspiration, the suicidologist stands Patrick Henry's famous exclamation, "Give me liberty or give me death!" on its head. In effect, it says, "Give him, commitment, give him electroshock, give him lobotomy, give him lifelong slavery, but do not let him choose death!... The result is a far-reaching infantilization and dehumanization of the suicidal person." ("The Ethics of Suicide, The Antioch Review, Spring 1971; Theology of Medicine; Political and Philosophical Foundations, pp. 75, 79-81).

In 1980 the Hemlock Society was founded by Derek Humphry, who had assisted his wife, diagnosed as terminally ill, to commit suicide. In 1991 it published the classic Final Exit, a manifesto of the right-to-die movement. I admired Humphry and wrote him in the late nineteen-eighties to say that his criteria for assisted suicide was too narrow. The right to die, I argued, should be extended first to mental patients who were suffering from inner torture which seemed incurable, and who should no more be forced to suffer than those diagnosed with a terminal physical illness. Secondly, it should be extended to those diagnosed with an incurable and severe physical illness-- blindness, paralysis and that sort of thing-- which, even if not fatal, reduced the quality of their life to the point where life was no longer living. Thirdly, it should be extended to convicts sentenced to life imprisonment, which I regard as a fate worse than death, which is why I have never supported the movement to abolish the death penalty-- what alternative is there? At the time, still believing that I lived in a democracy, I did not think to add that it should be extended to those threatened by political repression, although this obviously is only an argument for moral acceptance, for any such government would reveal the extent of its despotism precisely by denying the person this right. Humphry wrote me a polite response saying that if I wanted to extend the right to other categories of people I should found my own group, for the Hemlock Society was dedicated only to assisted suicide for those who were diagnosed with a terminal physical illness. Strategically he was right-- if people could not muster sufficient compassion to permit these people to die, how could they be expected to sympathize with mental patients, convicts, and the other categories I mentioned? But events were soon to prove that I was right in my contention that others beyond the terminally ill should be accorded the right to die.

In the nineteen-eighties, physician Jack Kevorkian began to assist terminally ill people to commit suicide in a very public way. Although his quest for publicity was to cut short his career, for which reason he was criticized by Humphry, it brought the issue into high relief among the public. In a sense America needed Kevorkian as much as it needed Humphry. But his attempt to bring the issue to a head backfired. Having helped some 130 terminally ill people to die, naturally he had his license to practice medicine revoked, for where suicide is concerned, the medical profession is still living in the dark ages. On the November, 23, 1998 broadcast of 60 Minutes, Kevorkian allowed the airing of a videotape he had made of the voluntary euthanasia of Thomas Youk. On March 1999, Kevorkian was accordingly charged with first-degree homicide. A Michigan jury found Kevorkian guilty of second-degree homicide (I have this from Wikipedia, and if it is correct, the terminology is chilling. "Homicide" is not a legal definition-- it simply means "the killing of a human being". One category of homicide-- killing in self-defense-- always has been and should be legal. Kevorkian should have been charged with manslaughter or murder, which are by definition crimes). He was sentenced to eight years in prison, which he accordingly accepted. And in prison they broke him--or at least in part. When he was released he told Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes that he would not assist anyone else to commit suicide, "because I gave my word that I would not". But this was merely a face-saving device. In fact, he had been forced to stop, because that was the condition of his release. And Kevorkian was only in an ordinary prison. What about the thousands now being held in Guantanamo and the secret CIA prisons, where fiendish tortures designed by psychiatrists are used to wear down the victim's defenses? Or those who will be sent to such prisons when our government turns openly fascist? Any incarcerated person can be broken. For that reason, in my opinion, Kevorkian himself should have committed suicide rather than allow himself to be incarcerated (oh yes, but he's running for Congress now, you will say-- but what difference can he make in a country which is no longer a democracy, where power resides not in elected officials but "Washington Insiders" and unelected bureaucrats?)

The Right-to-Die Movement has had one success story. In 1994 the governor of Oregon signed into law a "Death with Dignity" act passed by the state legislature. Oregon thus became the only one of the fifty states to be able to call itself truly civilized. Right-to-Die groups live on, although with altered names: The Hemlock Society changed its name to "Death With Dignity", "End-of-Life Choices" changed its name to "Compassion in Dying", then "Compassion in Dying" changed its name to "Compassion And Choices". The Voluntary Euthanasia Society of Australia changed its name to "Dying with Dignity" as did the Voluntary Euthanasia society of Great Britain. It is a sign of moral cowardice and our increasingly repressive times that people must engage in these ridiculous circumlocutions. As Humphry says, "Why not call a spade a spade?"

While there is such a thing as honorable suicide and death with dignity, there is also such a thing as dishonorable suicide. Kitty Dukakis is a prime example of the latter. Not long ago she gave an address to a group of college students on a northeastern campus (see "Addressing a 'Shocking' Issue, http://www.huntingtom-news.com/home/index.cfm?event=displayArticlePrinterFriendly&...) As she said, due to ECT, "I am a different person." To allow one's spirit to be killed and remade by others according to their own wishes is to display a profound lack of self-respect. But her opponents among the movement for the rights of psychiatric patients-- specifically Mind Freedom-- are no better. Having adoped the slogan "Mad Pride", which reinforces the most prevalent myth concerning mental illness-- that all mentally ill people are psychotic-- they have themselves committed a collective and dishonorable suicide. For another, when they had the chance to debate Dukakis they lost every opportunity she provided to defeat the pro-ECT forces. For one thing, they said her book was biased-- but as it is a personal account, not a scientific study, it cannot claim to be anything else. Different people value different things in life-- some value mere existence and animal gratification-- these are the people who seek dishonorable forms of suicide. Others value higher things such as freedom and independence. That Dukakis is of the former variety is evident. But in fact her own testimony can be used against ECT. She has admitted that it changed her personality. She has admitted that it affected her memory. She has admitted that the treatment has to be repeated again and again, so that it becomes in effect like an addictive drug. One could use her own testimony alone to argue against involuntary ECT.

When the issue of how it works came up, Dukakis said that the reason we don't know is because ECT equipment is produced by two small companies who cannot afford to study it. At that point Mind Freedom lost a valuable opportunity to ask if one of those companies is Mecta, and if so, why it is that Harold Sackeim, who is a consultant to that firm, found the support to do a study which finally admits that bilateral ECT causes cognitive defects but implies that unilateral is free of this risk. Clearly what we need are scientific studies aimed at assessing the cognitive effects of uniltateral ECT, but Mind Freedom shies away from this. Indeed, ECT survivor Leonard Frank, who is one of the organization's founders, told me that we already have enough information to ban ECT. But this is obviously not true, or else it would have already been banned, instead of increasing in prevalence and acceptance as it has. Sackeim has scored a spectacular coup against the movement for the rights of mental patients and they don't even recognize this fact. With friends like this, mental patients don't need enemies. There can be little doubt that increasing numbers of people will be forced to endure this spiritual murder in a society which still condemns death which is freely chosen.

For those who recognize what political opposition is ultimately going to mean in a nation headed in the direction ours is, suicide is a rational and even reassuring alternative, infinitely better than the alternatives of grovelling or being crushed in some hospital or prison. If one wonders whether it would be worth it to commit suicide under a totalitarian regime, let me quote George Orwell's villain O'Brien: "It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old days, the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the corridor waiting for the bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out." (1984, Signet edition, p. 210. Thus it is easy to see that the decision to die free has political significance, no matter how obscure the person who makes it may be. Let us resolve to blow out our own brains before Big Brother has even the slightest opportunity to go to work on them! But I don't advise suicide until one has exhausted every other option. And I would ask those considering it for political reasons to first ponder the following haiku I have composed on the subject:

And so the sakura
must fall. In our resolve to die lies
infinite freedom.

YES, OLD DOGS CAN LEARN NEW TRICKS

In my last blog, I wrote about the threat posed by long-time ECT advocate Harold Sackeim and five colleagues, "The Cognitive Effects of Electroconvulsive Therapy in Community Settings," in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology in January, 2007 (32: 244-254). The most obvious and immediate one, which I have already discussed, is that while showing that bilateral ECT produces adverse cognitive effects, the study still leaves the door open to the administration of right unilateral ECT-- indeed, as I have shown, promoting its use was the authors' intention. But the more I think about it, the more problems I find with this article, which has been so tragically misinterpreted by the movement for the rights of mental patients. For instance, if one analyzes the conclusion, which has given ECT opponents such false optimism, "There seems to be little justification for the continued first-line use of bilateral ECT in the treatment of major depression," one can see that not only does it not rule out the use of right unilateral ECT as a first-line treatment for that illness, it also does not rule out the use of bilateral ECT as a "last resort" if other methods fail. And perhaps even more disturbingly, it says absolutely nothing about the use of ECT to treat other mental illnesses besides major depression.

This presents a danger to a wide range of people because of the way that mental illness is defined. After all, only a minority of people who are diagnosed as mentally ill have ever experienced a psychotic episode. And of those who have-- schizophrenics, manic-depressives (those suffering from what is today called bipolar disorder) and depressives-- many are quite sane most of the time. I recently received the fall, 2008 Journal of Mind Freedom, the leading American organization fighting for the rights of mental patients, and was dismayed as always to find the term "mad pride" all over it. Indeed, the letter from the executive director, David Oaks, entitled "Why Mad Pride?" uses the term throughout with no apparent recognition of the way it discredits everything he says. No one will or should believe someone who is psychotic-- that is to say, irrational-- and organizations like Mind Freedom do not have to persuade the public to do so in order to achieve their goals. For it is unequivocally evident that, whatever he might have experienced in the past, David Oaks has not been having psychotic episodes for the twenty years during which he has headed Mind Freedom, and he was not having one when he wrote this letter. Mind Freedom could not possibly have mounted an effective campaign for anything whatsoever while its members were in the grip of psychosis. There is no evidence of it anywhere on their website or in their publications. Why then do they indulge in the manifestations of self-loathing signified by the term, "Mad Pride"? An article in the New York Times says that "Just as gay rights activists reclaimed the word 'queer' as a badge of honor rather than a slur, these advocates proudly call themselves 'mad'." But this is not true: having lived for much of my life in San Francisco I know that "queer" remains a slur-- what homosexuals did was to find a new word-- "gay"-- to describe themselves. The self-abasement indicated by their adoption of the word "mad" to describe themselves makes members of the movement for the rights of mental patients ill-equiped to fight ECT.

The majority of people diagnosed as mentally ill have what psychiatrists term a "personality disorder". "Personality disorder" is defined by the APA as an "enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior which deviates markedly from the expectations of the culture of the individual who exhibits it." Nothing comes closer to an admission that to psychiatry, people who are simply different are considered for that fact to be mentally ill. Given that this is the official definition (see Wikipedia article on the subject), no psychiatrist could deny that the object of psychiatry is to punish and persecute social deviance and non-conformity. People diagnosed with a personality disorder are not psychotic, but many psychiatrists believe that personality disorders represent milder forms of the psychoses they resemble. In other words, someone with a minor depression could become a major or manic-depressive, and someone with a schizoid or schizotypal personality could become schizophrenic. I recently received an e-mail circular from Rene Talbot, who heads an organization for the rights of mental patients in Germany. He said that his country is on the verge of adopting a provision, fraudulently claiming to be derived from the UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which would allow its government to incarcerate an individual diagnosed as mentally ill if he is a danger to himself or others, or under additional circumstances which are not specified. It is easy to see where this provision came from: the equally fraudulent "War on Terror" being waged by the United States government. The aspiring totalitarians in our government have not only the unconstitutional Military Commissions Act to use against dissidents, they also have the category of mental illness, which has long been used to incarcerate people against their will. And of course the worst weapon in their arsenal of repression is ECT.

Although ECT is usually thought of as a treatment for depression, it is in fact also being used against people who are diagnosed-- whether rightly or wrongly-- as schizophrenic (and remember that those diagnosed with a milder personality disorder which resembles schizophrenia can easily be pushed into this category). The website of ect.org has an article based on a number of studies which concludes that "There is some evidence to support the use of ECT for those with schizophrenia for short-term relief of symptoms. Electroconvulsive therapy may be advocated as an adjunct to anti-psychotic medication for those with schizophrenia who show a limited response to medication alone but the evidence for this is not strong... evidence exists to suggest that combining antipsychotic drugs with ECT increases the rate and extent of clinical improvement, in the short term, in one out of every five or six people." (http://www.ect.org/resources/schizophrenia/html) In other words, for the sake of mere short-term improvement, and although the majority of patients show no improvement at all, psychiatrists are willing to take the tremendous risks involved in the administration of ECT, in combination with anti-psychotic drugs which are themselves dangerous. Of course, as I have said before, we need more studies of the effects of unilateral ECT to determine just how dangerous it is, but no form of ECT can be said to be free of risk and to prescribe it under such questionable conditions is truly playing God. Leonard Frank's History of Shock Treatment contains an alarming quotation from English psychiatrist Andrew Wyllie: "The introverted schizophrenic or melancholic may be likened to a walled city which has closed its gates and refuses to trade with the rest of the world. Methods of persuasion having failed to get the citizens to open the gates of 'Mansoul', the artillery of convulsion therapy is brought to bear upon the walls of autism." (p. 14) It seems appropriate that Wyllie was willing to play the role of Satan in the story from which the name 'Mansoul' was taken-- John Bunyan's Holy War.

Is there any circumstance under which the adminstration of ECT may be justified? I was greatly disturbed by another article in the Fall Mind Freedom Journal. It was taken from an address by Mary Van Pelt, entitled "May is Mental Health Awareness Month". In it she speaks of the job discrimination that she, as a highly-placed professional, experienced when it became known that she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. This is a legitimate topic for an organization devoted to the rights of mental patients, and would be all the more relevant if she had been falsely diagnosed with a psychotic illness, as many people are. Then she goes off on a very dangerous tangent: "When my career ended so did my need to keep silent about a condition which kills thousands every year... Suicide statistics are difficult to track due to the very nature of suicide. The act is surrounded by stigma. Depending upon the circumstances, suicide can be reported as death from natural causes. The National Strategy for Suicide Prevention estimates that between three and twenty per cent of persons diagnosed with bipolar disorder die each year by suicide. Because of my own experience, I find this statistic very easy to understand." (p.11) How on earth could Mind Freedom have failed to see that this woman is quite obviously working not for patients' rights but rather for organized psychiatry? After all, bipolar disorder and suicide are not political issues, they are personal ones. And a feigned concern over the possibity of suicide is the most common justification for the use of ECT-- one assumes from his conclusion that Sackeim would approve of even bilateral ECT for the suicidal patient. In directing her comments at the danger of suicide rather than psychiatric abuse, Ms. Van Pelt shows very clearly where her sympathy lies-- not with mental patients but with psychiatrists.

Why is her tactic so dangerous and insidious? First of all, because people falsely assume that every suicide is the result of mental illness. Obviously Van Pelt does, and it is people like herself who have stigmatized suicide. Suicide, which was accepted as a legitimate response to many situations by cultures such as the Roman and Japanese, can be a perfectly rational act. It makes good sense for someone diagnosed with an agonizing but incurable illness to want to commit suicide--so too the painter who is told that he is going blind or the pianist who must lose the use of his hands. Above all, one must be ready to die when one is fighting a tyrannical government. By refusing to be taken alive, one spares oneself the pain and indignity of being held captive by people who have no decency or compassion. As for those who are contemplating suicide simply because they are afflicted with a clinical depression, one is certainly justified in stopping them-- at least for awhile-- in the hope that they will change their mind. One may even be justified in forcing anti-depressant medications on them temporarily, in the expectation that their mood will improve. But if they show no improvement, is one justified in using ECT? Some people, being fully informed, prefer the spiritual death involved in ECT to either a continuation of their depression or physical death. Obviously Kitty Dukakis did. And that is their right, just as it is their right to commit suicide. But if a person has been prevented from committing suicide for months, given medication and compassion and is still suicidal, I would present them with the following choice: "There is a treatment which may end your depression, although it will probably have to be repeated again and again all your life. It has worse side-effects than any drug known to man, in that it damages your memory and will, if administered a sufficient number of times, ultimately destroy your sense of identity. Do you wish us to administer this treatment to you or would you still prefer to die?" If they opt for the latter course, it is our moral obligation to provide them with the most humane method available of taking their own lives.

There is in fact no justification for forcing any form of ECT on anyone. Doing so is equivalent to murder. As we have seen, the majority of mental patients are sane and, fully informed, know perfectly well what is good for themselves. Even with those minority who may be having a psychotic episode and are in danger of taking a life they would regret having taken if they were sane, it is not justifiable to force something so dangerous as ECT upon them. Their inability to make a rational decision makes the treatment by definition involuntary. Ironically, the only people who are capable of giving their consent to ECT are those who are sane. Yet ECT continues to be used not only against the insane and incapacitated but also against those who are merely "different". This is the most hideous threat which hangs over anyone who has been diagnosed with a mental illness, however mild, (and perhaps some who have not been, for there is evidence that it may be being used against suspects in the so-called "War on Terror"). Activists for the rights of mental patients are not making things any better by printing articles such as Van Pelt's and speaking of "mad pride." Why not define mental illness in terms which suit the patient rather than the psychiatrist? For instance, a person suffering from bipolar disorder may warn, "Don't kill my spirit in order to save my body." Someone suffering from one of the schizotypal illnesses may declare, "I am a militant loner-- invade my mental space and you'll be sorry!" (in other words, this 'Mansoul' has artillery which can fire back). Above all, we must forever bear in mind the immmortal words of John Stuart Mill:

"Even despotism does not produce its worst effects so long as individuality exists under it, and whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men."