Leonard Roy Frank was committed when, after a lucrative Wall Street firm with which he was associated dried up, he took some time off to get in touch with his cultural roots: read up on orthodox Judaism, grew his beard out and grew long hair in the conventional orthodox style, became a vegetarian, studied the Talmud.
His folks freaked that he wasn't diligently seeking a new and equivalently lucrative position and was instead doing things that would probably minimize the likelihood of being hired in such a place, and arranged for a psychiatric consultation.
Psychiatric consultation resulted in Leonard Roy Frank's involuntary incarceration which included an involuntary series of shock treatments and eventually the shaving of his beard while he was unconscious after one such treatment (an event that Frank refers to as "Beard Removal Therapy")
A million anecdotes about compassionate, brilliant, dedicated, and wise psychiatrists doesn't alter the fact that they have way too much power, that there are insufficient checks against their abuse of it, and that this power is in fact horribly abused, and often.
Original SDMB thread - Psychology, the law, and being committed
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