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Imagine waking up in a mental health facility. Do you think you could persuade everyone that you're not mentally unstable and deserve to be released? Convincing others of your sanity may be harder than you think. It's alarmingly easy to be wrongfully and involuntarily placed in a psychiatric hospital, both in the United States and globally.
10. The Banking Conspiracy Theorist
Gustl Mollath was an ordinary German man who earned his living by restoring classic cars. However, he uncovered a massive banking conspiracy so significant that the world believed he had lost his sanity, resulting in his institutionalization for seven years.
Mollath earned a modest living working on cars, while his wife was employed at one of Germany’s largest financial institutions, HypoVereinsbank. Through his wife’s connection to the bank, Mollath uncovered a major tax evasion scheme carried out by the German bank. His discovery led to turmoil in their marriage, and after allegations of domestic violence, the couple was on the verge of divorce. Mollath exposed the bank’s tax evasion activities to the public, filing a substantial criminal complaint against HypoVereinsbank and its employees, including his wife. He claimed that the bank had been conducting illegal money transfers to Switzerland, a practice that would soon be classified as money laundering.
Initially, the German media ignored Mollath’s allegations, but the authorities did not. Mollath’s wife proceeded with the divorce and accused him of slashing her tires, as well as claiming he was abusive following his exposure of the banking conspiracy. German prosecutors charged Mollath, using his criminal complaint against HypoVereinsbank as 'proof' of his paranoid delusions. This led to his involuntary commitment to a mental institution.
Despite Mollath being confined to a psychiatric hospital, some did not believe he was insane. Bloggers, activists, and conspiracy theorists took up the investigation into Mollath’s accusations against HypoVereinsbank and found his claims to be true.
Years later, an internal report from HypoVereinsbank, confirming the tax evasion and money laundering scheme, was leaked to the press by a German newspaper. Mollath’s claims were proven correct, resulting in the bank being raided by German authorities on suspicion of tax fraud. Mollath was released from the mental hospital after a court ruling.
9. The NYPD Whistleblower
Adrian Schoolcraft was a member of the New York Police Department (NYPD) until he made the courageous decision to stand up against the corruption he witnessed within the force.
Officer Schoolcraft began his efforts to expose misconduct within the NYPD in 2008, secretly recording conversations between officers from 2008 to 2009. These tapes revealed a pattern of corruption, including illegal arrest quotas that led to numerous wrongful arrests across New York City.
As Schoolcraft gathered his evidence and voiced his concerns, he became the target of harassment by fellow officers. When he brought his allegations to his superiors, they dismissed them and suggested that he was mentally unstable. They recommended psychological treatment, and when Schoolcraft met with an NYPD psychologist, he was forced to surrender his weapon and reassigned to a trivial desk job.
Despite the setbacks, Schoolcraft persisted in his corruption claims, eventually bringing them to the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau. In response, the NYPD placed Schoolcraft under 'forced monitoring.' Not long after, an NYPD lieutenant seized the notes Schoolcraft had been gathering as evidence. Schoolcraft then received a call from his father, a former officer, warning him of potential retaliation from the NYPD. Within hours, officers entered Schoolcraft’s apartment after misleading his landlord into believing he was suicidal.
Just before the NYPD officers raided Schoolcraft’s apartment, he turned on two tape recorders to record the incident. After the NYPD officers broke into Schoolcraft’s apartment, they interrogated him before handcuffing him, taking him away, and involuntarily committing him to psychiatric ward in the nearby Jamaica Hospital Medical Center.
Schoolcraft was held in the psychiatric ward against his will. He was handcuffed to his bed and prevented from using the telephone to call for help at the orders of the NYPD.
After six days, Schoolcraft was able to leave the mental hospital and promptly filed a lawsuit against the NYPD and the mental hospital that held him against his will at the nefarious orders of the police. After his release, Schoolcraft was indefinitely suspended without pay from the NYPD. NYPD officers continued monitoring Schoolcraft and visiting him at his apartment for multiple weeks. Schoolcraft’s allegations of corruption, arrest quotas, and underreporting among the NYPD were later vindicated by the Village Voice.
8. The USSR’s Critics
The Soviet Union faced significant issues with its treatment of dissidents and its psychiatric practices, which led to widespread abuse of the mental health system. During the 1960s and 1970s, the USSR systematically diagnosed its critics with mental disorders to discredit them and remove them from society by sending them to psychiatric institutions.
The USSR even created psychological conditions such as 'delusion of reformism' and 'sluggish schizophrenia.' The term 'sluggish schizophrenia' was invented to allow the diagnosis of schizophrenia even when no symptoms were present. One such dissident, Valery Tarsis, was falsely diagnosed and involuntarily committed to an insane asylum after he smuggled his novel The Bluebottle, which criticized the USSR government, out of the country for publication.
Tarsis spent eight months confined in a Soviet mental institution. During his time there, he wrote one of the first literary works to expose the USSR's abusive use of psychiatry, a semi-autobiographical novel titled Ward 7.
In 1963, Soviet poet Joseph Brodsky was also involuntarily institutionalized, the same year as Tarsis. Brodsky was accused by Soviet authorities of living a 'parasitic life.' He was diagnosed as insane and forcibly committed. Brodsky endured brutal treatment, including forced tranquilizer injections and being awoken in the night by immersion in cold water. He spent 18 months in the psychiatric institution.
7. Side Effects of Pain Medications
In 1993, a man named John Montin from Nebraska took pain medication to alleviate his chronic back pain. This decision unknowingly led to his involuntary commitment to a psychiatric hospital.
According to the psychiatrist who assessed Montin, the pain medication caused a temporary psychosis. This altered mental state led Montin to visit a rural Nebraska home, where he bizarrely attempted to 'claim ownership' of the property, saying it belonged to his ancestors.
Accounts of what followed vary significantly. Nebraska police initially reported that Montin engaged in an 11-hour standoff with law enforcement, which resulted in no injuries. However, during Montin’s trial, the homeowners were said to have pointed shotguns at the disoriented Montin, which caused him to flee and hide in a nearby ditch overnight.
Most of the charges against Montin were dismissed by prosecutors. The jurors who oversaw his trial acquitted him of the remaining charges of attempted murder and weapons offenses. They also cleared Montin of false imprisonment and the use of a weapon 'due to insanity.' Based on the police reports detailing Montin’s actions during the incident, he was subsequently involuntarily committed to a mental institution.
When the effects of his back pain medication wore off several hours after the event, Montin was no longer insane. However, when Montin was sent to the Lincoln Regional Center Hospital’s psychiatric ward, the doctors there never evaluated him to determine if he had regained his sanity. Instead, they relied solely on police reports about his behavior during the incident.
Montin remained locked in the psychiatric ward for 20 years until he finally persuaded a doctor to reassess his condition. After an evaluation and hearing his side of the story, the doctor concluded that Montin was indeed sane and released him. Montin then filed a lawsuit against the Nebraska mental hospital for $33 million. The case remains unresolved.
6. Anti-Segregation Activist
As a history professor at Alcorn State University, Clennon Washington King Jr. had a front-row seat to the segregated educational system of 1950s Mississippi. King gained public attention in 1957 when he wrote letters to local newspapers advocating for the desegregation of schools, which led to threats of boycotts against Alcorn University from pro-segregationists in Mississippi.
Unfazed by the threats, King continued his fight against segregation. In 1958, he attempted to enroll one of his children in an all-white elementary school. His effort was unsuccessful, and fearing retaliation, his wife and children were forced to flee the area.
Later that year, King, a highly qualified academic, tried to enroll at the University of Mississippi. However, in 1958, the university had a strict policy barring African Americans from admission. Not only was he denied, but the university officials deemed him insane for attempting to attend an institution that excluded black students. As a result, King was committed to a mental hospital. His brother eventually secured his release after 12 days in the institution.
Two years later, James Meredith achieved what Professor King could not, becoming the first African American student to enroll at the University of Mississippi.
King would later run as a candidate in the 1960 presidential race for the Independent Afro-American Party, securing 1,485 votes in Alabama. This made him the first African American presidential candidate in U.S. history to run under a party nomination.
5. The Monitored Honors Student
Eze's troubles began when she suspected that her former landlords and roommates were involved in 'potentially criminal activity' and were defaming her online. The most disturbing of all was her belief that her landlord had secretly installed a hidden camera in her bedroom.
Her fears grew as she continued to feel like her privacy was being invaded, leading to a situation that shook her confidence in those around her.
Eze voiced her concerns to both her college security and the campus psychiatrist, but they dismissed her, offering no assistance despite her claim of discovering a hidden camera in her bedroom. Although Ms. Eze had no prior history of mental health issues, she was forcibly placed in an ambulance by college staff and taken to the psychiatric ward of Kings County Hospital without her consent. There, she was involuntarily committed for two weeks.
After her release from the psychiatric ward, Brooklyn College allegedly prevented Eze from completing her final exams. Following the incident, Eze chose to transfer out of Brooklyn College.
Ms. Eze filed a lawsuit against the mental facility that unjustly detained her for two weeks, winning a settlement of $110,000. She has also initiated legal action against Brooklyn College.
4. China's Dissidents
Much like the USSR, the People’s Republic of China has frequently resorted to labeling its critics as mentally unstable and involuntarily committing them to psychiatric institutions. One such individual was Xu Lindong, a 50-year-old farmer with a fourth-grade education who had spent his life working the land.
Lindong attempted to assist his illiterate neighbor in securing ownership of a small piece of land next to her home, even filing on her behalf to obtain the plot. However, after the court rejected her claim, Lindong began sending petitions to government officials, hoping someone would take action on her behalf.
Although the Chinese government acknowledged his petitions, they didn’t address his concerns. Instead, they deemed him insane and had him involuntarily committed to a mental institution, despite the absence of any signs of mental illness or a prior history of psychological issues.
While confined to the mental hospital, Lindong endured 54 brutal electroshock treatments. He was restrained, medicated against his will, and plunged into such despair that he attempted suicide three times. Xu Lindong spent a total of 6.5 years in two different psychiatric institutions, eventually being released after his brother managed to have a journalist publish his story in the local press.
Lindong’s experience is far from unique in China. Another example is Xu Wu, a former security guard who petitioned the government over an unresolved wage dispute. As a result, he was involuntarily committed to a mental institution for four years, undergoing electroshock therapy and battling thoughts of suicide during his confinement.
3. The First Hand-Washing Doctor
In the 19th century, medical practices were far more unsanitary than they are now. Doctors didn’t wash their hands, even before delivering babies. When one doctor suggested that medical professionals should wash their hands more thoroughly, the rest of the medical community dismissed him as delusional.
While working in a hospital in Germany, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis became concerned after observing his colleagues move directly from attending to deceased patients to delivering babies in the maternity ward without washing their hands. To lower infant mortality rates, Dr. Semmelweis recommended that doctors wash their hands before attending to newborns. This suggestion enraged the medical community, with many professionals, including Dr. Carl Levy, who wrote a rebuttal: “He is concerned only with general infection from corpses without regard to the disease that led to death. In this respect his opinion seems improbable.”
Unwavering in his beliefs, Semmelweis clashed with influential medical figures, ultimately leading to his dismissal from his position at Vienna General Hospital. Isolated and without work, Dr. Semmelweis fell into poverty, and his mental health deteriorated as he became depressed following his rejection by the medical community.
In 1865, Dr. Semmelweis was committed to an insane asylum. Tragically, he passed away from a blood infection after being severely beaten by asylum workers when he demanded his release. Semmelweis died at the age of 47, long before the medical community recognized that his advocacy for hand washing was not madness, but a revolutionary idea.
It wasn’t until 20 years after Semmelweis’s death that his theory gained widespread acceptance, largely due to French microbiologist Louis Pasteur’s development of the germ theory of disease. Soon after, medical professionals began following Semmelweis’s advice to wash their hands before childbirth. This practice greatly reduced infant mortality rates in hospitals.
The term “Semmelweis reflex” was coined as a reminder of his tragic story. It describes the instinctive rejection of new ideas or practices simply because they challenge established norms, theories, or beliefs.
2. Ex-Muslim Nigerian
Being an atheist in Nigeria, a deeply Muslim country where 51% of Muslims believe apostates should be executed, is incredibly difficult. Mubarak Bala, a former Muslim, found himself in this predicament. Instead of facing death, he was declared insane for renouncing Islam.
Bala publicly declared his renunciation of Islam by informing his family. Upon hearing this, they took him to see a doctor, suspecting he might be mentally unwell. The first doctor found no evidence of mental illness, but the family persuaded another doctor that Bala’s atheism was a symptom of a personality disorder. As a result, Bala was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility and forcibly medicated.
1. Homosexuality As A Mental Illness
In pre-20th century psychiatry, the reasons for being institutionalized were often bizarre and unscientific. People could be committed for reasons such as 'laziness,' 'bad whiskey,' 'imaginary female trouble,' or even because 'parents were cousins.' Homosexuality was frequently cited as a reason for institutionalization, as were 'promiscuity' and excessively strong sexual desires, especially among young women.
The impact of these practices lasted for decades. Up until 1973, homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association. One particularly recent case involved a lesbian named Lyn Duff, who in 1991, at the age of 14, came out publicly. Her mother, unable to accept the news, took Duff to Rivendell Psychiatric Center in Utah for 'treatment.'
While at the Utah psychiatric hospital, Duff was visited by Mormon missionaries who viewed her homosexuality as a mental disorder. The hospital staff attempted conversion therapy on her, subjecting her to some of the most bizarre treatments, including forcing her to watch lesbian pornography while inhaling ammonia in a Pavlovian effort to make her 'straight.' She was also administered psychotropic medications, placed under hypnosis, and isolated in solitary confinement.
Duff was held involuntarily in the mental institution for a total of 168 days. She eventually managed to escape in May 1992 and fled to San Francisco. Shortly thereafter, she successfully petitioned the California court to terminate her mother’s parental rights, and was adopted by a lesbian couple in San Francisco.
