Not Your Sweetie

The Shrink's opinion (letter to Guardian, Published on January 6):


""Guardian:
If a patient came into my office warning of an imminent
attack on the US with
weapons of mass destruction without there being any evidence
whatsoever that this
would occur, and saying that we had to strike first and
"take out" all those who were
a threat to us as a first step to world domination, I would
diagnose him as suffering
from paranoid and grandiose delusions and perhaps as
psychotic. And, fearing that
he constituted a potential danger to himself or others, I
would commit him to a
psychiatric hospital for a period of evaluation and
treament. I suspect that some of
my colleagues with licences to practice psychiatry in
Washington, D.C. are struggling
with the decision to exercise their clinical, ethical and
legal responsibilities to protect
the public now that the US Congress has failed to do so.

Dr. Eric Chivian
Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry
Harvard Medical School
Co-founder International Physicians for the Prevention of
Nuclear War, winners of
the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize