good conversation Philip....

Dear Philip:
It was nice to put a voice with your written word. This was an Interesting interview with madness radio, and a great informational venue for you to educate others on these mental health issues. There is always this debate of protection -verses- privacy and our constitutional rights. This is very fine line we have to walk in our society, especially in the area of mental health.
I have worked with SVP’s (sexually violent predators) in an institutional setting that you happened to mention briefly. I can’t really make any enlightening comments on the institution itself until I start my new job in community mental health for obvious legal and ethical reasons. I can only say with the strongest conviction on a personal opinion level; no medication available today, or treatment model now in use is going to help or make safe a person with a sociopathic and psychopathic diagnosis that has already acted out in a criminal and unacceptable manner (of course the DSM4 doesn’t recognize psychopath as a diagnostic reality to avoid offending them with that scary label, yet in my observations this diagnosis is very real and disturbing, which goes way beyond sociopathic criteria). Yes, some of these individuals are in dual diagnosis situations. Yet when you have little or no conscience, and cannot recognize any distinction between right and wrong doing on their part; your left with a dangerous population our constitutions authors were not prepared to deal with, or could have fore seen the civil liberties issues that would pop up in our modern social and legal environment. Of course back then they just executed them in a pretty gruesome manner as the solution to the problem. The over whelming majority (90% +) of this population refuse treatment options interiorly because they believe they are not mentally ill. It simply goes back to the common sense of “you can’t treat a person that doesn’t want to be treated or get better “. They are a significant social danger, and I personally have not witnessed any effective treatment process that shows respectable promise with any sense of success or safety to our society. I wish I could be more detailed and open on this subject, but I must keep it to my own personal opinion and stay general in scope as I can.
Except for my comment which I believe we concur upon; I must say I agree with you on about 100% of what you have said during this interview. Though I do think the host might be a little paranoid thinking that every police officer is out there looking to pummel a mentally ill person that crosses the line of normalcy. I would recommend everyone listen to this interview with open ears and switched on brain activity. I gave it the top CIA Genetically Altered Five Penguin Bipolar rating (laughing)
Yours Truly
Stan

That was awesome! Definitely the first mental health program I've heard that didn't make me want to scream at my radio to stop spouting absurd lies.

Not to diminish all the good work you do on this site, Philip, but I hope you'll get out there more on radio & maybe tv, since they have a bigger impact on the general public, and a serious shortage of reasonable people telling the truth.

I've listened to it too and it was good, nice work Philip.