Not Responsible

“For instance, a dentist who pleaded guilty to having fondled between one hundred and two hundred young girls and women patients…has now sued his insurance company, claiming that his ‘sexual disorder’ makes it impossible for him to work as a dentist, so the insurers should give him $5,000 a month in disability payments. Harold Lief, professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, supported this claim, telling the court that the dentist suffered from ‘frotteurism,’ a compulsion to touch women’s genitals.”

—Paula J. Caplan, Ph.D., They Say You’re Crazy—How the World’s Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who’s Normal (1995, Addison-Wesley), p. 276

“Charles J. Sykes, author of A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character takes note of a man who, having embezzled money and lost it in Atlantic City casinos, sued to win back his job because he was a victim of ‘compulsive gambling syndrome,’ and of a school administrator, fired for constantly missing classes, who calls himself a victim of ‘compulsive lateness syndrome.’”

—Joe Sharkey, Bedlam: Greed, Profiteering, and Fraud in a Mental Health System Gone Crazy, (1994, St. Martin’s Press) p. 146

“A typical case is that of the employee fired from a radio station in Washington state for offensive on-the-job behavior who recently was awarded $900,000 by a jury for a discriminatory firing and for the psychic injury done to her by the discrimination. Her poor job performance, according to professional opinion, was produced by a mental disability and therefore occurred entirely outside the realm of personal responsibility.”

—Margaret A. Hagen, Ph.D., Whores of the Court—The Fraud of Psychiatric Testimony and the Rape of American Justice (1997, Regan Books) p. 9