Dinesh D’Souza was convicted of the charge of breaking campaign finance laws last year. Part of his sentence was psychiatric counseling. Then there was a recent probation hearing for Mr. D’Souza to request his community service requirements be waived for the summer. Why? He is doing community service at a high school that is closed for the summer. The Judge denied his request and then things went bad. Judge Berman ordered psychiatric counseling because the Judge did not understand Mr. D’Souza’s beliefs. This is a wrong and disturbing precedent. Unless you are the 1970’s era KGB trying to silence enemies of the regime. From the article in Newsweek:

The psychiatrists D’Souza was first ordered to see found no signs of depression, but U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman overruled their findings and ordered D’Souza see a new psychological counselor weekly.

Red flag: his court ordered psychiatrists did not find any signs of mental illness. Now he has to see a new doctor (and pay for the “privilege”) weekly that perhaps is going to give the diagnosis that the judge wants to see? Oh but it gets better:

“I’m not singling out Mr. D’Souza to pick on him,” Judge Berman said. “A requirement for psychological counseling often comes up in my hearings in cases where I find it hard to understand why someone did what they did.”

He continued: “That Mr. D’Souza committed this crime involves a colossal failure of insight and introspection. The case notes also say Mr. D’Souza has weaknesses in controlling his own impulses and that he is prone to anger in reaction to criticism.”

Really? Do you think he is maybe angry he was convicted on a politically motivated charge? And trying to make Mr. D’Souza “mentally ill” for not sharing the judge’s agenda and beliefs is appalling. To make things worse (or to use a nice mental health term: this triggers me), the USSR used Political Psychiatry to lock up enemies of the state. The Special Psychiatric Hospitals even coined the charming phrase Sluggish Schizophrenia to describe the dissidents.

World awareness of the political use of psychiatry developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s as reports surfaced that the Soviet Union and some Eastern European countries, such as Romania, were locking up dissidents and religious followers in psychiatric institutions.

“This practice represented a systematic use of a health profession to incarcerate healthy individuals into Special Psychiatric Hospitals, administered by the U.S.S.R. Ministry of the Interior, or the police, and not the U.S.S.R. Ministry of Health,” the Geneva Initiative on Psychiatry (GIP) (2003b) explained in its statement about political psychiatry.

It seems to me that the judge is trying to paint a sane man as crazy for a thought crime.  Why? The judge was a psych major in college.  So he knows better than a practicing psychiatrist or psychologist who he ordered Mr. D’Souza to see?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuzS7GNbMZc