what they are experiencing, when they know that you can and intend
to control them, they experience a huge sense of relief. I could
always get mentally ill people to tell me what was really going on
in their heads when no one else could get them to communicate.

A few years later I married an American and became the Mental Health
Coordinator for Whatcom County, the northwestern corner of
Washington State. I handled all the legal proceedings in the county
for mentally ill people. After treatment in the state mental
hospital I supervised their reentry into the community, and
attempted to provide some follow up. This work further confirmed my
conclusions that in most cases the mentally ill weren't helped by
conventional treatment. Most of them rapidly became social problems
after discharge. It seemed the mental hospital's only ethically
defensible function was incarceration--providing temporary relief
for the family and community from the mentally ill person's
destructiveness.

I did see a few people recover in the mental health system.
Inevitably these were young, and had not yet become
institutionalized, a term describing someone who comes to like being
in the hospital because confinement feels safe. Hospitalization can
mean three square meals and a bed. It frequently means an
opportunity to have a sex life (many female inmates are highly
promiscuous). Many psychotics are also criminal; the hospital seems
far better to them than jail. Many chronically mentally ill are also
experts at manipulating the system. When homeless, they deliberately
get hospitalized for some outrageous deed just before winter. They
then "recover" when the fine weather of spring returns.