Man arrested in mistaken identity case locked in mental hospital for two years | Hacker News Reader

Man arrested in mistaken identity case locked in mental hospital for two years

theguardian.com

84 pointsanigbrowl20 comments

> “The more Mr. Spriestersbach vocalized his innocence by asserting that he is not Mr Castleberry, the more he was declared delusional and psychotic by the HSH staff and doctors and heavily medicated,”

This kind of shit is why I will never again make the mistake of being fully honest with a mental health professional about suicidal ideation, unless there is radical change in how mental health emergencies are handled. Too often, the choice is between punishment (if you speak up too much) and neglect (if you shut up and do as you're told). I'd rather risk handling things myself than risk that kind of "help" again.

I'm not anti-psychiatry in general, but it's become clear to me that the field has a deadly serious problem with paternalistic arrogance, and absolutely no sign I can see of being on a course to seriously reckon with it.

The man did suffer from mental health issues, which apparently is why nobody believed his protests, instead construing the protests as evidence of delusion sufficient to justify continued institutionalization. The Guardian article fails to mention this critical detail, but other articles do, at least in passing:

> His sister, Vedanta Griffith, spent nearly 16 years looking for him. He moved to Hawaii with Griffith when her husband was stationed on Oahu with the Army in 2003. He moved to the Big Island and then disappeared, while suffering mental health issues, she said.

https://www.expressnews.com/news/article/Mistaken-identity-l...

It's still unacceptable, but not quite the same story. The counterfactual would likely have had him released to the streets, continuing to suffer from mental illness.

Our unreasonable, narcissistic, excessive fear of authority is why so many mentally ill are left to rot on the streets. In fact, our culture's extreme paranoia regarding these risks seems to detrimentally manifest itself in the mentally ill, such as with paranoid schizophrenics. AFAIU, schizophrenia manifests differently in different cultures, and it manifests with particular paranoia, fear, and violence in Western societies and especially the United States. In general it seems the mentally ill often reflect and act out, in an exaggerated manner, our shared cultural fears and prejudices. For example, most of the recent anti-Asian physical assaults were committed by the mentally ill. It begs the question, is it their fault or our fault collectively?

Compare popular opinion surrounding the defund the police movement. Most people are willing to except the risk of police abuse, including those communities most at risk from abuse, given the benefit that the police provide. Opinions seem to shift when it comes to civil commitment, even though civil commitment abuses seem less common than police abuse. As a culture we seem to feel more vulnerable, perhaps because mental illness contradicts our cultural beliefs regarding autonomy and agency.

We need to get over it. The mentally ill used to be able to rely on family and community for support. But as a society we've eviscerated if not completely destroyed those support networks. Nuclear families don't have the resources to take on that burden alone. An early consequence was a shift to mental institutions while the community looked away; but then we swung wildly in the opposite direction and just dumped them out on the streets where we can't physically look away, but can still lie to ourselves about the reasons they're there (e.g. blaming income inequality). In both cases it's a failure to face our fears head-on.

This is some hardcore victim blaming.

The man is wrongfully incarcerated and medicated against his will for years, and your response is "if people trusted authority more this wouldn't happen."

What?

What happened is wrong. But the reaction, including the failure by the media to properly contextualize the incident, implying that simple denials of an erroneous identity can cause people (and the state) to institutionalize you, also reflects a harmful cultural pathology. Despite all the hand-wringing, that pathology has resulted in making civil commitment and other coercive measures for mental health treatment historically difficult and exceptionally rare, with the direct consequence that I often see in various American cities mentally ill people literally, physically rotting on the street (e.g. someone living on the street, clearly suffering from severe mental illness, with gangrenous legs due to diabetes or other disease). (In rural areas it's more hidden because housing is cheaper.)

So, yeah, I think it's a serious and consequential issue. Again, the counterfactual here is the man living homeless on the street, which judging by the newspaper articles and the HN thread suggests most people were tacitly okay with--it's the status quo, afterall. That doesn't justify what happened to him; it's the reaction to the incident that is problematic--the pearl clutching, "OMG that could happen to me", "this is why we need to make it even more difficult to force treatment."

IOW, this man was victimized twice, not just once. Instead of nursing our paranoia about our own largely imagined vulnerability to state coercion, people should be asking how we can create a more proactive, more dynamic system. That may mean not only more checks & balances, but a greater allocation of power to the system, not less. (To make a technical analogy, look at CI/CD, where you get better at something by exercising it more often, not by avoiding it.)

The authorities you appeal to here are evidently as delusional as this particular human canary they so confidently and cooperatively caged up.

What the authorities need is competition, or else continued abuses of their monopoly are certain.

A system that enables these kinds of outcomes should not be allowed to promote their services as helpful to people. One man's potential settlement check does not acquit them of their responsibilities.

A system that sends people to the sidewalk and then punishes them there does not need to be fed any more, it is eating plenty on its own.

It is completely reasonable to be concerned about what happened, particularly in light of the psychiatric communities abysmally poor track record on respecting human rights. It isn’t a “dangerous cultural pathology” or “hand wringing” or “pearl clutching”. It is quite dishonest to frame all objections in such emotionally charged language.

I also object to the idea that the fact that he is homeless is relevant. Homeless people are just as deserving as fundamental human rights as everyone else, and the magnitude of the crime is not lessor because the victim was someone defenseless.

Being able to confine people and drug them against their will without even proper oversight is way more power than anyone should have. Once the proper oversight is in place, we can talk about how to make the system more ”dynamic”, but until then it is absolute lunacy to suggest that it should have more power.

Wow this is utter insanity. So you are saying he deserved to be locked up under the pretense that he was someone else because he was homeless and at one point had some mental health issues?

You are deranged. You are a hell of a lot scarier to me than this guy is.

And I'm sure if you were incarcerated on false pretenses you would just shrug your shoulders and say "authority is authority" and accept the lost years of your life right? (Not like some narcissist who would prefer not to be locked up for no reason)

Honestly it sounds like that lesson would probably do you some good.

>Our unreasonable, narcissistic, excessive fear of authority is why so many mentally ill are left to rot on the streets.

Pretty sure it's the lack of affordable single occupancy housing and lack of low price health care.

>blaming income inequality

Maximizing profit from healthcare and housing development is an undeniable factor in causing this situation.

It's hard to rely on family when you're not even allowed to contact your family because the people holding you don't believe you are who you are.

No matter the fact that he did suffer from mental problems, denying his story and refusing to verify it has made the situation, and probably his mental problems, far worse than they could have been.

> The man did suffer from mental health issues, which apparently is why nobody believed his protests

But they didn't know who he really was; or he wouldn't have been there. If they didn't know who he was, they couldn't have known that he previously suffered from mental health issues.

Psychiatric hospitals have an enormous amount of power that not many people realize. M1 holds can be re-applied indefinitely to basically confine you against your will. Then almost like in the old Soviet Union days, they can medicate you until you exhibit the symptoms of the diagnosis the hospital wants, thus covering up the initial reason for being admitted.

When I was a teen I felt mentally very off so I asked to go to a psychiatric hospital, and my parents drove me there. I wasn't acting out or anything, just depressed. There, I was put under sedatives and with one other boy we joked how we would escape through the windows. Some nurse heard it and didn't get that we were joking. Under the influence of sedatives I put my hand on her shoulder (which I would normally not do) and tried to assure her that it was just a joke and the windows would've been impossible to escape from anyway as they were barred. Anyway she took it as an attack and few guys appeared and forced me down. They put me into this bed with straps so I couldn't move at all and injected some other sedative all the while threatening that I will never get out of here. They also didn't allow me to make any calls or anything so I was clueless about what is going on and when I will get out. Luckily next day my parents came and I was able to get out. But this was an overall terrifiyng experience for me.

Wow. Where's the outrage. We should be filling the streets.

It's a hole in the constitution that lets us confine people for years without seeing a jury.

--Oh well you aren't being convicted of a crime --No, you cant leave --Where's my trial then? --What trial? You're not accused of any crime.

Yes some states have moved to make it harder to institutionalize people, but I shouldn't have to rely on state rules.

Abrogating the 4th Amendment is just common sense mental health controls.

Reminds me of the Rosenhan Experiment [1] showing how fraught and unreliable psychiatric diagnoses can be.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment

The intellectual basis of psychiatry is very shaky. The process of diagnosis is not so much "fraught" as it is a kind of enforcement of the assessing psychiatrist's instinctive reading of the situation.

I've always wondered what happens if you try and escape from a situation like this and end up killing someone in the process. Are you criminally responsible in this type of kidnapping situation?

Bad feels when Sarah Connor ends up punished for the murders the T-1000 committed.

Now imagine what would happen in the media if this happened in a certain eastern country.

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