Bruce J. Ennis' Prisoners of Psychiatry

I'm reading this book--and it is very interesting. Bruce J. Ennis was the New York Civil Liberties Union attorney who, more than anyone else, is responsible for having largely destroyed the mental illness commitment system that was in effect in the United States into the 1960s.

I find it fascinating how Ennis asserts that less than 5% of the mental hospital inmates are dangerous to themselves or others--and yet his first example of people improperly labeled as mentally ill was a Charlie Youngblood who called the U.S. Attorney-General in 1969, and threatened him with violence because he was unhappy about his veterans disability claim--and then worked his way down a list of other officials to call up and threaten with violence. The U.S. Attorney sought to have Youngblood declared incompetent to stand trial on these charges, and Ennis admits that even the NYCLU's psychiatrists agreed Youngblood was paranoid schizophrenic, and Youngblood did not deny that he had made the calls in question.

Another example that shows Ennis' ideological motivations was a guy named Alfred Curt von Wolfersdorf, apparently a member of the German-American Bund before World War II, who was charged with a murder in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1950. Joseph Louis Paonessa, who actually pulled the trigger on a 13 year-old boy, claimed that von Wolfersdorf had forced him to do it, with the threat of death. Ennis portrays Paonessa as an untrustworthy witness against von Wolfersdorf, and makes it sound as though von Wolfersdorf was locked up in a mental hospital for 20 years without cause.

The district attorney, however, even into the late 1970s, maintained that von Wolfersdorf had manipulated psychiatrists to get himself declared incompetent and avoid what happened to Paonessa--who was tried, convicted, and executed in 1953. Von Wolfersdorf managed to stay alive, getting himself released in the early 1970s with Ennis' help.

I can't tell if Ennis was right, and von Wolfersdorf was an unfairly accused person, or if the DA was right, and von Wolfersdorf cleverly gamed the system to avoid being executed. But Ennis' account is certainly incomplete.

Ennis gives a bit more detail on the Donaldson v. O'Connor (1975) lawsuit. Was Donaldson mentally ill? Ennis’ account of the circumstances that led to Donaldson’s commitment would at least suggest that, whatever the failures of the legal system to properly address the question, there was at least some reason to wonder about Donaldson’s mental health. While visiting his parents in Pinellas County, Florida:

The visit, their first in many years, was pleasant, and nothing unusual happened for several months. Then, in late November, Donaldson began to feel drowsy, and he mentioned to his father that someone, perhaps one of the neighbors, might be putting something in his food. When asked why he even suspected such an unlikely thing, Donaldson told his parents of a similar episode that had happened to him three years earlier, while he was living in Lynnwood, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. Donaldson had eaten regularly in the same Lynnwood diner. One day, shortly after lunch, he began to feel peculiar, and he went to a physician recommended by his landlady. The physician took a urine sample and sent it to a laboratory. The lab report, which Donaldson still has, confirmed the presence of a large amount of codeine, a sedative, in his urine. Donaldson had not been taking any cough syrup, which sometimes contains codeine, or any other medication (he was a follower of the Christian Science faith), so he must reasoned that the codeine must have been placed in his food, either on purpose or by accident.

J.B. O'Connor, the hospital's superintendent during most of Donaldson’s stay, seems to have been unable to defend his reasons for either the initial commitment, or holding Donaldson until 1971. Much of Ennis’ account of Donaldson’s continued confinement suggests that once the state hospital staff realized that Donaldson no longer needed to be there (if there had ever been a good reason), that the director was reluctant to admit that they had erred in keeping him-—especially because Donaldson’s lawsuits sought damages not simply from the state of Florida, but from O’Connor as an individual.