[AFAIK]

A French court has ordered far-right leader Marine Le Pen to undergo psychiatric tests as part of an inquiry into her sharing images of Islamic State group atrocities.

Ms Le Pen tweeted pictures of the court order , calling the move "crazy".

She posted the images back in 2015, including one showing the decapitated body of IS victim James Foley.

She has been stripped of her immunity as a parliamentarian and she could still face a fine or even jail.

As leader of what was then the National Front, Ms Le Pen was comfortably beaten by Emmanuel Macron in the second round of presidential elections last year.

Since then she has been attempting to rebuild, and the party has been rebranded as National Rally in part to try to distance it from the taint of racism.

According to the document posted by Ms Le Pen, the judge wants the tests to determine if she suffers mental illness or is "capable of understanding remarks and answering questions".

"It's crazy," Ms Le Pen tweeted. "This regime is really starting to be frightening."
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She later told reporters she had no intention of submitting to the assessment. Prosecutors told Le Parisien newspaper the request was standard procedure .

Ms Le Pen sparked an outcry when she posted the images, which she shared in response to a journalist who drew a comparison between IS and her party

The other images showed a tank running over a man in an orange jumpsuit, while another jumpsuit-clad man was shown in a cage being burned alive.

The case against her stems from French laws against circulating "violent messages that incite terrorism or pornography or seriously harm human dignity" and that can be viewed by a minor.

Even the courts are trolling LePen on twitter.

[Beren]

She may have been fine in 2015, but I wonder how she's been since the last French presidential election.

[Deutschmania]

On one hand , this might be said by some to herald the rise of the French equivalent to the dreaded psikhhushka . But with that being said , as long as there is not political abuse , or bias in operation, I wish America could do likewise to Trump .

[Sivad]

Political abuse of psychiatry is the misuse of psychiatry, including diagnosis, detention, and treatment, for the purposes of obstructing the human rights of individuals and/or groups in a society.[1][2]:491 In other words, abuse of psychiatry (including that for political purposes) is the deliberate action of having citizens psychiatrically diagnosed who need neither psychiatric restraint nor psychiatric treatment.[3] Psychiatrists have been involved in human rights abuses in states across the world when the definitions of mental disease were expanded to include political disobedience.[4]:6 As scholars have long argued, governmental and medical institutions code menaces to authority as mental diseases during political disturbances.[5]:14 Nowadays, in many countries, political prisoners are sometimes confined and abused in psychiatric hospitals.[6]:3[7]

Psychiatry possesses a built-in capacity for abuse that is greater than in other areas of medicine.[8]:65 The diagnosis of mental disease allows the state to hold persons against their will and insist upon therapy in their interest and in the broader interests of society.[8]:65 Psychiatry can be used to bypass standard legal procedures for establishing guilt or innocence and allow political incarceration without the ordinary odium attaching to such political trials.[8]:65 The use of hospitals instead of jails also prevents the victims from receiving legal aid before the courts in some countries, makes indefinite incarceration possible, and discredits the individuals and their ideas.[9]:29 In that manner, whenever open trials are undesirable, they are avoided.[9]:29

The political abuse of the power entrusted to physicians, and particularly psychiatrists, has a long and abundant history, for example during the Nazi era and the Soviet rule when political dissenters were labeled as "mentally ill" and subjected to inhumane "treatments".[10] In the period from the 1960s up to 1986, abuse of psychiatry for political purposes was reported to be systematic in the Soviet Union, and occasional in other Eastern European countries such as Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.[8]:66 The practice of incarceration of political dissidents in psychiatric hospitals in Eastern Europe and the former USSR damaged the credibility of psychiatric practice in these states and entailed strong condemnation from the international community.[11] Political abuse of psychiatry also takes place in the People's Republic of China.[1] Psychiatric diagnoses such as the diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia" in political dissidents in the USSR were used for political purposes.


United States

Drapetomania was a supposed mental illness described by American physician Samuel A. Cartwright in 1851 that caused black slaves to flee captivity.[37]:41 In addition to inventing drapetomania, Cartwright prescribed a remedy. His feeling was that with "proper medical advice, strictly followed, this troublesome practice that many Negroes have of running away can be almost entirely prevented."[38] In the case of slaves "sulky and dissatisfied without cause"—a warning sign of imminent flight—Cartwright prescribed "whipping the devil out of them" as a "preventative measure".[39][40][41] As a remedy for this disease, doctors also made running a physical impossibility by prescribing the removal of both big toes.[37]:42

In the United States, political dissenters have been involuntarily committed. For example, in 1927 a demonstrator named Aurora D'Angelo was sent to a mental health facility for psychiatric evaluation after she participated in a rally in support of Sacco and Vanzetti.[42]
Frances Farmer, 1942. After visiting the USSR.

When Clennon W. King, Jr., an African-American pastor and activist of the Civil Rights Movement, attempted to enroll at the all-white University of Mississippi for summer graduate courses in 1958, the Mississippi police arrested him on the grounds that "any N***** who tried to enter Ole Miss must be crazy."[43] Keeping King's whereabouts secret for 48 hours, the Mississippi authorities kept him confined to a mental hospital for twelve days before a panel of doctors established the activist's sanity.[44]

In the 1964 election, Fact magazine polled American Psychiatric Association members on whether Barry Goldwater was fit to be president and published "The Unconscious of a Conservative: A Special Issue on the Mind of Barry Goldwater." This led to the banning of diagnosing public figures when you have not performed an examination or been authorized to release information by the patient. This became the Goldwater rule.[45][46]
In the 1970s, Martha Beall Mitchell, wife of U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell, was diagnosed with a paranoid mental disorder for claiming that the administration of President Richard M. Nixon was engaged in illegal activities. Many of her claims were later proved correct, and the term "Martha Mitchell effect" was coined to describe mental health misdiagnoses when accurate claims are dismissed as delusional.

In 1972 Thomas Eagleton was forced to withdraw as a vice presidential candidate for being treated for depression.[47]

In 2006, Canadian psychiatrist Colin A. Ross's book was published, titled The C.I.A. Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists.[48] The book presents evidence based on 15,000 pages of documents received from the CIA via the Freedom of Information Act that there have been systematic, pervasive violations of human rights by American psychiatrists during the recent 65 years.[48]

In 2010, the book The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease by psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl (who also has a Ph.D. in American studies) was published.[5] The book covers the history of the 1960s Ionia State Hospital located in Ionia, Michigan and now converted to a prison and focuses on exposing the trend of this hospital to diagnose African Americans with schizophrenia because of their civil rights ideas.[5] The book suggests that in part the sudden influx of such diagnoses could be traced to a change in wording in the DSM-II, which compared to the previous edition added "hostility" and "aggression" as signs of the disorder.[5]

Clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine, argues that Oppositional Defiant Disorder, which can be easily used to pathologize anti-authoritarianism, is an abuse of psychiatry.
In 2014, Mercury News published a series of articles detailing questionable use of psychotropic drugs within California's foster care system where bad behavior is attributed to various mental conditions, and little care is provided besides drugs. Likewise, many experts questioned the long-term effects of high dosages on developing brains, and some former patients reported permanent side effects even after stopping the meds.[49]

According to journalist Jonathan Turley and Newsweek magazine, in June 2015, U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman ordered conservative film maker and activist Dinesh D'Souza to continue psychological counseling for a four-year period despite numerous recommendations to the contrary by well-respected private and court appointed mental health personnel. D'Souza pleaded guilty to a single count of making illegal contributions in the name of others as part of the campaign of Wendy Long for New York Senate. This occurred during a post-confinenment hearing. D'Souza was seeking to reduce the four-year community service sentence by reference to his home confinement period. Berman balked and said that he said the two periods as distinct—a position that courts would likely take in similar cases. In referring to the psychological counseling aspect, D'Souza's counsel submitted evidence that the court-ordered psychiatrist found no indication of depression or reason for medication. His own retained psychologist also provided a written statement concluding there was no need to continue the consultation. However, Judge Berman disagreed and said that he thought more counseling will help while noting that this is not punishment: "I only insisted on psychological counseling as part of Mr. D'Souza's sentence because I wanted to be helpful. I am requiring Mr. D'Souza to see a new psychological counselor and to continue the weekly psychological consultation not as part of his punishment or to be retributive." The court insisted "I'm not singling out Mr. D'Souza to pick on him. 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."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political ... ted_States