Saturday September 26, 2026 12:30 am est

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A civilization is judged not by how it treats the powerful, but by how it treats the decent and defenseless when no one is watching. By that measure, the United States has lost all self-respect.

We have built a quiet, bureaucratic machinery for destroying innocent people through psychiatry, and we have normalized it to the point of invisibility. Good people — not dangerous, not delusional, but decent — are branded, blacklisted, and broken. And then, to compound the crime, we offer them nothing. No apology. No appeal. No acknowledgment. No path back.

This is not an accident. It is a system of physical, social, financial, and emotional abuse that leaves no part of a life untouched. A diagnosis becomes a scarlet letter. A medical record becomes a blacklist. Employment vanishes, reputations are smeared, families are pressured to distance themselves, bank accounts are drained by forced interventions and legal costs, and the emotional toll is calculated to be unbearable.

And who are we doing this to? Look at who is targeted. It is so often activists — the very people who still believe enough in this country to try to fix it. It is the gifted, the well-educated, the most intelligent, ethical, and compassionate people we have. Doctors who ask questions. Lawyers who won't look away. Business people with keen minds who refuse to go along. Artists, entertainers, writers, and thinkers whose only crime is seeing clearly and speaking plainly.

These are among the Best and Brightest the human species produces, and we push them to the absolute depths of human despair. We force them into a fight for literal survival, begging for menial jobs that high school dropouts would find demeaning, not because they lack talent, but because we have made their talent unemployable through intentional stigmatization.

That is the game plan. Smear the victim so thoroughly, isolate them so completely, strip them of income, status, and community, until they have nowhere to turn. The hope of the psychiatric apparatus is that its victims, abandoned by a society that has normalized this filth, will come crawling back begging for more abuse — because abuse is the only door left open.

In the process, this brings out the absolute worst in mankind. The most unqualified, ignorant, and ethically vacant people in society enrich themselves from the jobs, the licenses, the platforms, and the lives they stole. They profit from theft by psychiatry. They build careers on the graves of careers they helped bury.

A nation that allows this, that watches its most principled citizens be systematically defamed and pauperized and then shrugs, has no self-respect. Self-respect would demand accountability. Self-respect would demand due process, restitution, apologies, and appeals. Self-respect would protect the innocent, not sacrifice them to protect an industry.

Until we dismantle these blacklists, until we demand answers for every life derailed and every gift wasted, we are not a civilization. We are a marketplace for sanctioned cruelty.

Harry was the kind of kid they put on brochures.

Honors. Valedictorian speech that made the principal cry. Full scholarship, law review, the human rights clinic at 24 where he was already writing briefs that older lawyers asked to borrow.

He wasn't worried about excessive amounts of money. He never chased wealth. He just wanted to earn enough to live a decent life — an apartment that wasn't falling apart, to pay his bills without panic, to keep doing the hard cases.

He wanted the cases nobody else wanted — the whistleblowers, the mothers who lost kids to the system, the men who came out of custody with a file thicker than their lives. He believed in the system. That was his fatal flaw.

It started with one case. A woman, an artist, brilliant, well-read, who had been labeled and erased after she filed a complaint against a city agency. Harry read her medical file and saw what it was: not medicine, but a blacklist written in Latin. He said so, on the record, in a court filing. Polite, footnoted, devastating.

Three weeks later, someone filed a "concern" about Harry.

Not a lawsuit. Not a complaint. A concern. Anonymous. "Erratic." "Grandiose." "Possible burnout." The words that never have to prove themselves.

He was invited — not ordered, invited — to a wellness evaluation. For his own good. For the good of his clients. He laughed at first. Then his managing partner stopped making eye contact.

The evaluation took twenty minutes. He answered honestly. That he was working late. That he was angry about what he saw. That he wasn't sleeping well because he was carrying other people's nightmares. That honesty was transcribed as pathology.

The report came back with a term that would follow him like a second shadow. It didn't need to be true. It just needed to be searchable.

No one fired him. That would have been too clean, too appealable. Instead, they worried. They re-assigned his cases. They suggested a leave. His bar association file got a quiet flag. His health insurance required a new authorization for his own care that he never asked for. When he applied for a fellowship in D.C., the background check came back "incomplete pending medical clearance." No one could explain what that meant. No one would put it in writing.

This is how it works in America. No trial. No apology. No appeal. Just a slow, filthy erosion of the physical, social, financial, and emotional ground beneath your feet.

Within a year, Harry — who had once been flown to Geneva to speak on due process — was filling out applications for document review at $22 an hour. The algorithm that screened his resume saw the gap, saw the flag, and moved on. A temp agency asked if he had considered customer service. A former classmate who had cheated off his outlines was now general counsel somewhere and left him on read.

He was, by every metric that used to matter, among the best and brightest we had. Gifted, educated, ethical to a fault, compassionate when cynicism would have been easier. That is precisely why he was intolerable to the system.

They had smeared him so badly he was supposed to come crawling back. That's the game plan. Break the gifted activist until he begs the very hand that broke him for a letter saying he's well. Until he agrees to be "compliant." Until he agrees to say that what happened to him was care.

He sat one night in a one-bedroom with a flickering light, surrounded by case law he had printed because he couldn't afford Westlaw anymore, and understood the final, obscene inversion: the most unqualified, ignorant people in the room were now enriching themselves from the job, the reputation, the future that had been stolen from him. They wore his life like a suit that didn't fit.

And there would never be a letter that said: we were wrong. Sorry.

He didn't disappear. He started writing. Not briefs — stories. Under a name that couldn't be flagged yet. One story at a time about people like him. Doctors targeted after they reported safety issues. Lawyers who wouldn't play dead. Business owners, entertainers, artists — the brilliant ones pushed to beg for jobs high school dropouts would find demeaning, just to survive on enough to live a decent life.

He wrote because a nation that does this to its decent, innocent victims has no self-respect left. And self-respect, if it is ever going to return, has to start with someone willing to say out loud what everyone else pretends not to see.

Fiction by Dr Harold Mandel