Word: yoder
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...sign of our nation's benevolence or its laxity that Yoder is not in prison for these offenses but is instead hospitalized? Since 1991, Yoder has been involuntarily committed to a Chester, Ill., asylum, the Chester Mental Health Center. Yoder, it may surprise you to learn, would rather be in prison. He fought a long legal battle during the 1990s to get himself prosecuted for sending menacing letters to people like Playboy CEO Christie Hefner and the late M&M tycoon Forrest Mars Sr. because he wanted to be sentenced to a fixed term rather than remain committed indefinitely...
...group of doctors from around the country has joined Yoder's fight and wants to secure his release at an upcoming trial. The court proceeding will be extraordinary not only because it could finally liberate a man once described in court as one of Illinois' most dangerous mental patients but also because the entire field of psychiatry will go on trial. This is not a figure of speech: Yoder plans to call experts to testify that "mentally ill" is merely a term we use to describe socially unacceptable people and that any medical field that can hold...
...case has gone mostly unnoticed outside local papers. But Yoder's tireless campaign to build a movement for his release is beginning to gain national support. "I have found no evidence of psychosis--only a justifiably angry man," wrote Dr. Loren Mosher in a letter last year to Illinois Governor George Ryan. A former chief of schizophrenia studies at the National Institute of Mental Health, Mosher charged that "the state is practicing preventive detention in the guise of mental-health 'treatment.'" Yoder's most famous advocate is Patch Adams, the physician Robin Williams played in the movie. "He was angry...
...Will Yoder ever get out? One could imagine a treacly Patch Adams and a fiery Thomas Szasz swaying a jury. But state officials will argue that everyone else is better off with Yoder behind Chester's 14-ft. fence. They will say his failure to cooperate with treatment is evidence of his illness, which, even if misdiagnosed in the past, still exists. "The system is not perfect," says Vallabhaneni, the psychiatrist who wrote Yoder's incomplete commitment evaluation in 1991. "But that doesn't change the real picture of what Rodney Yoder is: he is very, very ill." Even Hardy...
...part, Yoder imagines living out his years in a little chalet on a Vermont mountain. "I could write about psychiatry and send people cranky e-mails," he says with a grin. He says he has no intention of harming anyone. It's unclear what impact the decision in his case will have on the broader issue of patients' rights. If he wins, the "psychiatric survivors" movement may have a new poster boy, and other states might look more carefully at patients who may be sick or may just be antisocial. Of course, finding the line between...