Big brother on the couch

Daniele Canarelli is a psychiatrist in Marsailles. She deals with folks who have severe mental health issues on a daily basis. Joel Galliard is a paranoid schizophrenic who needed treatment.

Mr. Galliard became Dr. Canarelli's patient. Twenty days after leaving a session, Mr. Galliard killed German Trabuc with an axe. He was judged not responsible for his actions due to his mental illness and released under medical supervision.

But you know the story didn't end there. It's such an unsatisfactory ending when the person who did the deed is found to have not been responsible for his actions. There's a dead body. Somebody must be made to account for it.

And that someone was Dr. Canarelli. She was found guilty of involuntary homicide and sentenced to one year in prison. The sentence was suspended.

It is a fact that folks with severe mental illnesses can do things that shock the conscience. They can do things that are utterly unexpected. Once that person leaves a session there is nothing that a psychiatrist can do. Sure, you can prescribe medications. You can suggest certain behaviors to combat stressful situations. You can suggest that a patient be hospitalized.

The courts in France have stepped across a very dangerous threshold. The courts are the place for the law to be dispensed by those who are trained in it. The courts are not the place to second guess a doctor's treatment plan for a patient. Dr. Canarelli dealt with Mr. Galliard. Presumably he confided in her and she maintained his confidences. She made decisions based upon her diagnosis of Mr. Galliard's condition and her training in psychiatry. Maybe her treatment plan was wrong. And maybe the treatment plan failed because Mr. Galliard decided he didn't want to follow it.

While accepting that there was no such thing as "zero risk" in such cases and that doctors could not predict the actions of their patients, the court found that Canarelli had made several mistakes in Gaillard's treatment.

But now we have a court interjecting itself into the doctor-patient relationship and assigning criminal liability on a medical professional based on the actions of her patient. We don't need courts evaluating the treatment plans of psychiatrists. We don't need courts deciding whether or not a particular treatment plan was appropriate. We don't need courts deciding whether or not a physician should have done something else.

A legal system is good (just go with the analogy for a second) at trying to determine what happened and what penalty should be levied in the event that someone acted negligently or illegally. A legal system is not able to look into the future to determine what might happen.

A psychiatrist, on the other hand, must be able to get to the bottom of what happened in the past as well as be able to predict the future to a degree.

While a court takes what has already happened and tries to piece it together into a coherent narrative to determine how and why it happened, a psychiatrist must take what happened in the past and apply it to the present in order to make an educated guess at what might happen tomorrow - or the day after.

Maybe Dr. Canarelli was negligent in her treatment of Mr. Galliard. Maybe there were other courses of treatment she could have followed. But, if that's the case, she shouldn't be placed in the dock in a criminal court - she should have been defending herself in a wrongful death suit. Any errors she may have made fall under the heading of malpractice, not criminal behavior.

And now we have the specter of the state inserting itself in determining what type of care a doctor should provide her patient. What kind of an incentive is that going to give to psychiatrists in treating their patients?

Will profits triumph over people?

Today voters in France and Greece go to the polls in the first elections since austerity measures were imposed. The situation in Greece is far more dire than in France. The unemployment rate in Greece is among the highest in Europe and the people are suffering from drastic austerity measures as part of an agreement the Greek government made to pay back international banks and investors. Unemployment rates for young people in France is bad (though not as bad as in Spain) and the economy is just grinding along.

The choice is clear for voters: people or profits. Drastic cuts in government spending and increases in taxes are choking the poor and middle classes. Those affected by the policies are those least able to absorb the sudden shock.

Banks and investors poured money into Europe over the last decade - lured by good interest rate spreads. Now for those of y'all not familiar with how interest rates work, here's a quick primer. Interest is the cost of borrowing money. The theory being that there are many things I can do with the money in my pocket and if I lend it to you instead of using it myself then I have lost the immediate use of that money. To compensate me for the things I can't do since I don't have the money in my pocket, you will make an additional payment, called interest. The amount of interest I charge you depends on how likely I think you are to pay me back on time. The more likely you are to pay me, the less I charge. The more I feel you might not be able to pay me back, the more I charge.

The other factor to consider is inflation. If the money I lend you today is likely to worth less when you pay me back, I will have to charge you more to make up for the lost value. On the other hand, if there is little inflation I will charge you less.

The difference between the interest rate and rate of inflation is called the spread. The higher the spread, the more profitable the loan should be.

Banks and investors bought Greek bonds because they looked at the expected spread and thought they could make a handsome profit - either because they anticipate inflation to be lower than predicted or because they thought the Greek government was promising to pay more in interest than the anticipated risk.

Well guess what. It turned out the Greek government wasn't promising enough of a risk premium and that banks and investors underestimated the chances of Greece not paying them back. That, my friends, is part of capitalism. If all investments were safe then the long term interest rate would equal the long term inflation rate. If that were the case then no one would lend money because there would be no profit to be made.

The imposition of austerity measures across Europe are the mechanism by which large banks and international investors can extort their profits from the European working class. These investors knew the risks of lending money and, instead of licking their wounds and looking for the next opportunity to exploit, they are using politicians in Germany and France to force those who can least afford it to boost their bottom lines.

We'd never sacrifice freedom for security, would we?

Was Mohammed Merah part of a global al-Qaeda conspiracy to subvert the west or was he a nut job with a firearm? Since he was shot dead by French police last week in Toulouse we will never know the real answer to that question.

However, being that there's an election brewing in France, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has wasted no time proclaiming that Mr. Merah was but the first wave of Islamic terrorists coming to bring down the Republic. And, as is par for the course when confronting such a dangerous threat, the first thing the state must do is clamp down on the civil liberties and freedoms of the citizenry. I mean, let's be real, we mustn't allow the public to say and do things that might be disagreeable to the "right-thinking" citizens of France.

Mr. Sarkozy has proposed that the government make it a crime for an individual to consult a website that promotes terrorism or racism or hatred. Such restrictions are nothing new in France. It is against the law in France to promote racial hatred or to deny the Holocaust (and don't forget speech denying that the Turks committed genocide against the Armenians).

Who defines what promoting terrorism is? It may be trite, but one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Must one consult with the French Foreign Ministry before surfing the web to make certain you aren't clicking through to a website promoting rebellion against some French-supported government on the other side of the world?

What would this restriction mean for students and scholars? Will the French police compile a list of websites that are off-limits to the citizenry? And how would anyone know who visited the website? You might be able to narrow it down to a computer or a small wireless network, but without a confession how would you prove that Jacques clicked through to the al-Qaeda website or took a look at the al-Qaeda Twitter feed (what, you mean the SEO folks haven't gotten through to Osama bin Laden's successor about getting them on the first page)?

Mr. Sarkozy would also make it illegal for people to travel abroad for "terrorist indoctrination." And just what the hell does that even mean? The only difference between a peaceful protester and a terrorist, after all, is someone with a little more firepower than a rock. Again, would Mr. Sarkozy only throw those folks in jail who didn't consult with the government about whom it's alright to protest against? And how would that work for French soldiers training under a foreign flag in another country battling an internal rebellion (or whatever the hell is going on in Afghanistan)?

He also proposes banning "militant Muslim preachers" from entering the country. I guess that means it's okay for militant Christian and Jewish religious leaders to spout their right-wing theories across the French countryside. And what makes a preacher "militant?" Would that be someone who is uncompromising, who raises his voice or someone whose view of the world differs from the government's "official" version?

Mr. Sarkozy, I don't know how to break this to you, but you just can't stop the flow of information anymore. The internet, satellite television and radio and cell phones have pretty much made that the modern-day equivalent of tilting at windmills. I get the fact you're losing at the polls and that you need something, anything, to get people's minds off of how little you've accomplished. Sowing the seeds of hate and fear is a time-honored political tactic. Hell, George W. Bush practically wrote the 4th Amendment out of existence in the post-9/11 hysteria.

For a few votes more

This week the French Senate approved a bill that would make it a crime to deny that the Turks committed genocide against Armenians during World War I. Anyone denying it was genocide could face jail and a fine of up to $58,000.

The rise of the Thought Police in the United States is troubling enough - but to make it a crime to disagree with what someone else says goes beyond anything we could imagine on this side of the pond.

Maybe it was genocide. Maybe it wasn't. That, ultimately, is a question for the historians to answer. But to criminalize a point of view makes a mockery of scholarship. It also makes a mockery of the French justice system.

According to the BBC, there are half-a-million French citizens of Armenian descent. Did the party of President Sarkozy pass the bill in order to curry favor with those voters? Was the criminalization of thought the price to pay for a few more votes? What does that say about the state of politics in France?

Maybe the politicians in France have forgotten the words of the Declaration of the Rights of Men written during the heyday of the French Revolution.

Article 4 states:

Liberty consists in the power to do anything that does not injure others; accordingly, the exercise of the rights of each man has no limits except those that secure the enjoyment of these same rights to the other members of society. These limits can be determined only by law.

Article 5 states:

The law has only the rights to forbid such actions as are injurious to society. Nothing can be forbidden that is not interdicted by the law, and no one can be constrained to do that which it does not order.

Can someone explain to me how the exercise of speech can "injure" another. Sure, you might disagree with what I say, but my words are just that - words. They have no more power than you allow them to have. It is quite a stretch to conclude that denying the Turks committed genocide against Armenians a century ago is injurious.

Likewise, disagreeing with a statement is not injurious to society. It is through the exchange of different, and sometimes contradictory, ideas that our knowledge of the world increases. To criminalize such a disagreement will serve only to chill speech and scholarship.

How ironic that the French gave us the Statute of Liberty.