Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis

Who is the Predator Here?

We approach this topic with some trepidation, as there can be considerable fixed opinions regarding the topic of sex.

We feel, however, that the news is relevant — and we’d like your permission to continue reading. We aren’t concerned so much with offending anyone; we’re sure we do that anyway by exposing the fraud and abuse inherent in the mental health care system. So if you have an emotional reaction to this information, we dare you to read on.

If you may be feeling upset, angry, or otherwise overwhelmed by any of the material we present in our newsletters, know this: The intention in presenting these materials is not at all to make anyone feel overwhelmed or upset. Our intention is to expose what has been hidden from the general public by various forces, to shine the light of truth on the psychiatric industry, and to restore human rights and dignity to the field of mental health.

Our intention is for you to be enraged by the pervasive abuse of human rights by the psychiatric mental health care industry and incite you to action. If you know of people who have been harmed by a psychiatrist or by a psychiatric facility, encourage them to file a complaint.

Sex offenders who have completed their prison sentences are often detained (usually for life) in prison-like psychiatric facilities based on the completely mistaken assumption that their having committed sexual crimes somehow means they are also mentally ill. These however, are criminal actions and are covered by criminal justice, not psychiatric diagnoses.

A recent article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch discusses this topic. [“Judge calls sex predator law misapplied“, 9/12/2015]

A U.S. District Judge ruled that Missouri’s sexually violent predator law, although constitutional, is seriously misapplied.

“The judge wrote that there is a ‘pervasive sense of hopelessness’ at the Department of Mental Health’s Sex Offender Rehabilitation and Treatment Services, or SORTS program, because patients aren’t being properly released.”

“SORTS is indefinitely committing about 200 people to treatment in the belief that they might re-offend.”

“The overwhelming evidence at trial — much of which came from Defendants’ own experts — did establish that the SORTS civil commitment program suffers from systemic failures regarding risk assessment and release that have resulted in the continued confinement of individuals who no longer meet the criteria for commitment, in violation of the Due Process Clause. … The Constitution does not allow (Missouri officials) to impose lifetime detention on individuals who have completed their prison sentences and who no longer pose a danger to the public, no matter how heinous their past conduct.”

They call this process “civil commitment” – an attempt to make it sound less harsh than “involuntary commitment.”

Displaying a surprising ignorance of (and careless indifference to) proper diagnostic practice, psychologists and psychiatrists routinely and rotely misdiagnose mental disorder in sexual offenders who are in fact clearly no more than simple criminals.

Statutory checks on the abuse of civil commitment laws are scarce, readily sidestepped and widely ignored. Yet the minds and memories of those subjected to this capriciousness have frequently been destroyed after involuntary imprisonment in psychiatric facilities across the nation.

When any psychiatrist has full legal power to cause your involuntary physical detention by force (kidnapping), subject you to physical pain and mental stress (torture), leave you permanently mentally damaged (cruel and unusual punishment), with or without proving to your peers that you are a danger to yourself or others, then, by definition, a totalitarian state exists.

Because of their ubiquity and far–reaching powers, involuntary commitment laws lay a truly concrete foundation for totalitarianism. And they are not, it must be stressed, a threat of what might be, but a present danger — representing America’s gaping breach in the otherwise admirable wall of individual Constitutional rights.

With health care eating up vast amounts of our national budget, the first spending cut to make is the cost of “treating” people who prefer not to be mentally treated. Involuntary commitment laws hike federal, state, county, city and private health care costs under the strange circumstance of a patient–recipient who cannot say no, and in this case of a person who has already paid their time in prison.

CCHR recommends that citizens execute a Living Will, or Letter of Protection from Psychiatric Incarceration and/or Treatment, which directs that psychiatric incarceration, hospitalization, treatment or procedures not be imposed on you.

Click here for more information about involuntary commitment.