Rodney tells me he responded, "Doctor, do you believe you are gay?" which question was answered, "Certainly not!" Rodney smiled, "Well, there you are." And everyone in the room laughed out loud.
We had been discussing the Lindsay Clancy case, and the media and public reactions to it. I am optimistic that Clancy will either eventually be found guilty of murdering her children, thereby demonstrating the clear deterioration of social and jurisprudential patience with the insanity defense; or there will be so much negative blowback from the lack of a murder conviction that a cultural inflection point will be reached against psychiatry's dehumanizing and destructive power within our system of criminal law.
Rodney is ever the pessimist. In the past he was always right: I only hope he is wrong now. The difference between us is perhaps caused by the fact that he was a helpless victim of the nuthouse, tortured for thirteen years, to barely escape and rebuild his life with his own hands and his back and his sweat and his own mind. I on the other hand, was a privileged antagonist of the nuthouse, mostly immune from retribution because of my position as an officer of the Courts of the State Illinois which derived from wealth I never had to work very hard for myself. Rodney's son once remarked to my son (after saving his life in a snowstorm), "Your family's rich, mine's poor. That's the only difference."
The "proof" of mental illness by an accused ("diagnosed") person's denial alone is based in a concept called "anosognosia," which was originally a real neurological phenomenon not meant for conversion to the mechanism of psychiatric bullshit or gaslighted mind control that it has become. It is something I've written about before, on at least a couple occasions. This related to the Clancy case in our conversation today because Rodney and I make opposite estimates of the public's belief in what he calls "The Gospel of Psychoquackery."
I say 10% of people do still believe, and he says only 10% don't believe, in the central elements of this Gospel: 1. Mental illness is a real disease; 2. Psychiatrists are real doctors; 3. Bad conversation and neuropoisons are real treatment for mental illness; 4. Bad behavior is caused by mental illness; 5. People called or calling themselves mentally ill are real patients; and 6. Denying any of this is a symptom of mental illness. I could probably write a whole article on each one of these points, but that sixth element is where "anosognosia" comes in.
We'll see what happens in the wake of People v. Clancy. If I can just live long enough to be sure that public belief in Rodney's "Gospel of Psychoquakery" is less than 10%, this will have been a victorious life for me. Whatever riches come to me by such victory will go to reparations, and I'll hope to walk away with nothing but the shirt on my back.
If I can do that, I'll live forever and work in eternity.
