According to the International College of Neuroethics and Neuroscience (ICONN): While people with Schizophrenia make up only 1% of overall population, they make up:

24% of jail population

20-30% of homeless population

15% of state prison population

To say that “mental illness” is criminalized is a style of expression within the advocacy community, meant to appeal to what they believe to be the good in humanity. Some advocates believe that if they cannot move people to compassion, then perhaps the “Cost of Not Caring” will. They site the hundreds of millions of dollars spent housing convicted persons in jails and prisons, hoping that if for no other reason, society would be motivated to spend less tax dollars on the criminalized “mentally ill”. The problem is that this kind of language makes advocates for the “mentally ill” the worst, most ineffective advocates of any humanitarian cause.

The fundamental problem is that the criminal legal system is out of step with medical science. The question that needs to be posed to the criminal legal system is this: Is it just to prosecute, convict and punish someone that was neurologically detached from reality – a disorder of waking consciousness, which is truly an encephalopathic condition, or who was afflicted with a dysmentative state that stripped the accused of metacognitive regulatory control.

How do law enforcement officers, prosecutors, DAs, judges and justices get to a place of intellectual insight and understanding such that they can respond to that challenge question the right way? The advocacy community is doing nothing the enlighten them when they use the very language and the very constructs that lead the practitioners and adjudicators of criminal justice into the darkness…imposing punishment on the most philosophically innocent among all accused persons.

The most hideous of “Psychiatry’s” lexicon is to be found in the content of ICONN’s site: They refer to “psychotic illness”. But what does that term mean to the general public? How do they think they can use a term like that without cooperating with criminalization? “Psychotic” in common parlance is a vicious slur used in a verbal attack, or in an assessment of someone’s mind being ‘evil’. Would someone ever be accused of being heart diseased?

There is no indication on their website that they recognize what “mental illness” means to most people.

When we use the term “mental illness”, not brain illness, do we put our patients in harm’s way?

………Drs Mary Baker and Matthew Menken,  2001

Drs. Baker and Menken recognized that most people conceptualized “mental illness” as a psychosocialspiritual issue, which translates to criminalization, inequitable healthcare, and homelessness.

Most people think a “mental illness” is a crisis of the soul. And thus, no exculpation is warranted for someone that has violated the law because they were in emotional or psychological distress. Yet, most people can conceptualize how alcohol intoxication or drug use can cause a person to act in ways that are socially unacceptable or violative of laws. They have insight into how those intoxicants can act upon the brain – even if ultimately, the may feel that punishment is just on the basis of the accused having made a choice to intake a substance that could strip them of regulatory control.

The advocacy community is cooperating with, not challenging criminalization, because they fail to understand that the deeply troubled field of “Psychiatry” and the belief systems of a dominant cohort is the root of the problem. Behold, titles of articles in academic journals of “Psychiatry”

“Psyche and Spirit: connecting psychiatry and spirituality”

“Religion in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy?” A Pilot Study: The Meaning of Religiosity/Spirituality from Staff’s Perspective in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy”

Visit the APA’s social media profiles and what do we find them posting about? Metaphorical health, i.e. ‘mental health’- a term that refers to the psychosocial, not neurological brain syndromes.

“Tips to Manage Your Mental Health During the Holidays”

“Social media detox linked to better mental health”

“Why ‘Retail Therapy’ Makes You Feel Happier”

Psychiatry is the root cause of criminalization and that’s why reclassifying brain syndromes such as the misnomered “schizophrenia” out of psychiatry, renaming its metaphorical “diagnoses”, and eradicating its hideous, misleading lexicon in reference to neurodevelopmental encephalopathies is an imperative.