They Call Him Crazy

A great philosopher once said–or should have–that the true test of a free society is not how it treats its best citizen but how it treats its biggest jerk. You’ve never heard of Rodney Yoder, but he is assuredly one of America’s most spectacular jerks. He is preternaturally rude. He sues people constantly. He abused the two women who put up with him. And he has allegedly written scores of letters to public figures that talk of slaughtering them in dreadful ways.

Is it a sign of our nation’s benevolence or its laxity that Yoder is not in prison for these offenses but is instead hospitalized? Since 1991, Yoder has been involuntarily committed to a Chester, Ill., asylum, the Chester Mental Health Center. Yoder, it may surprise you to learn, would rather be in prison. He fought a long legal battle during the 1990s to get himself prosecuted for sending menacing letters to people like Playboy CEO Christie Hefner and the late M&M tycoon Forrest Mars Sr. because he wanted to be sentenced to a fixed term rather than remain committed indefinitely. He lost that battle, so to walk free, he must now convince an Illinois court either that he is not mentally ill or that he is not a threat.

A group of doctors from around the country has joined Yoder’s fight and wants to secure his release at an upcoming trial. The court proceeding will be extraordinary not only because it could finally liberate a man once described in court as one of Illinois’ most dangerous mental patients but also because the entire field of psychiatry will go on trial. This is not a figure of speech: Yoder plans to call experts to testify that “mentally ill” is merely a term we use to describe socially unacceptable people and that any medical field that can hold a man for more than a decade and not improve his life must be a failure. The implication of his case is that the true test of psychiatry is not how it treats Princeton mathematicians with “beautiful minds” but how it treats–or fails to treat–its Rodney Yoders, the difficult, impoverished patients who will never be played by Russell Crowe.

So far, the case has gone mostly unnoticed outside local papers. But Yoder’s tireless campaign to build a movement for his release is beginning to gain national support. “I have found no evidence of psychosis–only a justifiably angry man,” wrote Dr. Loren Mosher in a letter last year to Illinois Governor George Ryan. A former chief of schizophrenia studies at the National Institute of Mental Health, Mosher charged that “the state is practicing preventive detention in the guise of mental-health ‘treatment.'” Yoder’s most famous advocate is Patch Adams, the physician Robin Williams played in the movie. “He was angry, but it was clear to me that he wasn’t crazy,” says Adams of his first communications with Yoder several years ago. “I’m putting all my reputation behind saying he won’t hurt somebody.”

Illinois officials shudder at the thought that Yoder might get out. They say his threatening correspondence–“I’ll make sure there isn’t enough of you left to identify,” reads a typical letter to a judge–proves he is a dangerous man who will explode. But in Illinois, as in all other states, only dangerous people who are also deemed mentally ill can be involuntarily committed. That’s why Illinois has hired its own big-ticket experts to evaluate Yoder and, presumably, testify against him. One, the forensic psychologist Reid Meloy, worked with prosecutors on the Timothy McVeigh trial. Meloy & Co. will lend outside heft to the government’s position that Yoder suffers from delusional and paranoid disorders so severe that he doesn’t recognize them. As state psychologist Daniel Cuneo said in a 1999 trial, “Mr. Yoder continues to have much rage. Without tight controls, he will erupt.”

Yoder’s case is unusual but perhaps not unique. About 22,000 Americans are held against their will in state psychiatric hospitals. Since the 1960s, many of those institutions have closed, and hundreds of thousands of patients have been freed, some of them improvidently. Many ended up in jail; others are homeless. A few mentally ill people have committed homicides after being discharged, and those killings have won vast media coverage. In response, seven states have passed laws making it easier for authorities to force psychiatric treatment. Recently the nation tried to make sense of Andrea Yates, who drowned her children after years of ineffective schizophrenia treatment. Her case revealed a mental-health system too distracted and meagerly funded to decide what to do with her.

But another side of the mental-health story is about those who are locked up and perhaps should not be. Some 78,000 people live in public and private mental hospitals. Advocates of laws making it easier to commit people argue that hospitalizing those who don’t recognize their severe mental illness can help both them and the rest of us. Dr. Fuller Torrey, a get-tough proponent who has battled Yoder’s supporters, says two studies show that roughly 40% of those released from psychiatric hospitals end up in jail within a year.

Still, as a recent New York Times series revealed, institutions for the mentally ill don’t always provide a safe environment. A Times reporter found that unskilled workers at private homes for the mentally ill in New York had neglected patients and coerced some into unneeded surgery. “Psychiatric survivors” from around the nation have formed a movement to publicize abuses against them, chiefly unnecessary drugging and involuntary electroshock.

Largely because of his legal prowess, Yoder has endured nothing so extreme. But even though some of his fellow residents at the Chester hospital committed murders of breathtaking brutality, he has lived at the state’s only maximum-security facility for the criminally insane more than twice as long as the average patient. His advocates say it was a suspicious chain of events that got Yoder committed in the first place, and there is evidence to support them. The tale of his arrival at Chester is long and winding, but it reveals some startling lapses in the legal system designed to protect people from being wrongly committed.

Yoder likes to say that state officials see him as a real-life Hannibal Lecter. And some do believe he is profoundly sick. Three years ago, state psychologist Cuneo said in court, “I can only think of a handful of individuals that I would consider more dangerous than Mr. Yoder at the hospital.” But those who run Chester seem to have a more mundane view. Except that you pass through sliding steel doors before you get to the wards, visiting Chester isn’t so different from visiting an ordinary hospital. On the day of my interview, I offered my bag for searching, but Bob Poole, the administrator who greeted me, declined to look. He escorted me around a metal detector. I expected there would be a partition between Yoder and me, but Poole took me into a plain visitors’ room, where Yoder stood unshackled.

Smiling and wearing a tweed jacket and well-polished shoes, Yoder shook my hand and introduced himself. Earlier, Poole had asked if I wanted a guard present, and I had said, “I don’t know, do I?” A former guard himself, Poole had only shrugged, though he did ask an unarmed man to sit outside in the hall. Poole closed the door on his way out.

Talking to Yoder is frustrating. He interrupts. He often finishes a thought and then asks insistently, “Do you understand?” or “Are you listening?” He launches into prolix harangues against Illinois or psychiatrists or his ex-wife. He seems to treat all but two or three people in the world as if they are irretrievably stupid. It would be folly to try to diagnose Yoder–over the years, mental-health professionals have offered several different diagnoses, including bipolar disorder for a time and delusional disorder now. But to a layperson, Yoder seems more petulant than demented. He banged the table a couple of times. He said overblown things like, “I might die here, and if I do, shame on America, shame on the land of Lincoln.” But that’s the sort of thing you might say if you felt you were wrongly imprisoned. At his most unguarded moments, he seemed sad.

When you talk with him, Yoder leaves out the worst parts of his bio, but one consequence of his litigiousness is that his life is written in court files. Born in 1958, he ended up in foster care at 15 because, he says, his home “was a violent hellhole.” Like his parents, he had volatile relationships. In 1979, he hit his girlfriend, an older divorce named Toni Herring. Yoder says he gave her “a garden-variety black eye,” but prosecutors said he broke her orbital bone. After confronting her with a knife while on probation, Yoder got four years in prison.

A 1981 psychiatrist’s report portrays Yoder as a heartsick young man who “desperately wanted to re-establish his relationship” at the time of the crime. The report says Yoder had been guzzling Canadian Club and tripping on two hits of acid when he went to Herring’s house with the knife. The psychiatrist noted that after his arrest, Yoder was sexually assaulted in jail and twice tried to commit suicide–once by drinking Clorox. And the report says Yoder wrote threatening letters as “an expression of his despair.”

The letters promise garish violence: “I’ll…pump about 3 boxes of shells into her from a 12-guage [sic],” says one that is signed with Yoder’s name and prison-register number. His warden, Stephen Hardy, heard about at least nine alarming letters and initiated an investigation that led to Yoder’s losing two years of credit earned for good behavior. Yoder then sued Hardy and won; Yoder presented evidence that several state officials had ignored the rules for revoking good-time credit in order to keep him incarcerated. The officials were plainly worried that Yoder would act on his threats, but–as an appellate court later agreed–they had trampled his due-process rights.

Less than a month after the original ruling against Hardy, the warden sought another way to keep Yoder from going free: he petitioned the court to commit Yoder to a mental hospital. The court was provided with a copy of another foul letter signed with Yoder’s name. Addressed to a state judge, it describes, quite graphically, how the writer would rape His Honor.

But Hardy’s petition omitted less colorful details. It said Yoder was “hostile and delusional in that he believes he is the victim of a conspiracy”–but failed to mention the lost-credit incident that had made Yoder hostile or the courtroom evidence that Yoder had been the victim of a conspiracy. Hardy checked a box on the petition saying he was “not involved in litigation” with Yoder, when in fact he had just appealed Yoder’s victory. Hardy now says such errors were unintentional and “didn’t really make any difference in the validity and justification for him being committed.” But there is no record that the court knew the whole story before ordering Yoder to the hospital. He was held there three months, until the feds sought to prosecute him for threatening President Ronald Reagan. That prosecution collapsed on thin evidence, and he was finally let go in 1983.

Yoder’s life approached normalcy in the ’80s. Not long after leaving Chester, he met Shirley Peters, a plainspoken woman who lived in the apartment under his mother’s place. He and Shirley married and moved to Tacoma, Wash., and had two kids, Jennifer and Loren. Yoder attended Fort Steilacoom College and got straight A’s in political science. He also sold real estate. “He was a pretty normal guy, really, except when he drank,” says Shirley. They eventually moved back to Illinois, and the relationship unraveled. “There were times I ran around with black eyes,” she says. They divorced in 1989.

On Jan. 12, 1990, Yoder had his second terrible fight with a woman he had loved. Monumentally drunk, he argued with Shirley about whether a man who baby-sat was molesting the children. “I went berserk and…hit my ex-wife in the head with a table leg,” he later wrote. Shirley says she had nine stitches. Yoder pleaded guilty and went to prison, where a psychiatrist examined him. The doctor said Yoder was hostile and negative but didn’t meet the standard for involuntary hospitalization. He wasn’t a danger, the doctor wrote, and there was “no indication of acute psychopathology.”

Always vigorous–even frenetic–in his own defense, Yoder spent the next year initiating court proceedings. Saying his guilty plea had been coached out of him, he tried to change it. The court blocked the move. Yoder also sued prison administrators, alleging various mistreatments. That won him a reputation as a problem inmate who couldn’t manage his rage. It didn’t help that he wrote “file my motherf_____ pleadings NOW” to a court clerk. In June 1991, Mary Flannigan, one of the administrators Yoder was suing, sought to have him involuntarily committed for a second time. On her petition, she also checked a box saying she was “not involved in litigation with the respondent,” which wasn’t true.

In support of Flannigan’s effort, a new psychiatrist, Dr. Nageswararao Vallabhaneni, wrote two damaging reports about Yoder. One said Yoder was having “paranoid delusions” but gave only sketchy examples: “[Yoder] named several people as his political enemies,” the doctor wrote, specifying three individuals, including Hardy. Yoder had defeated Hardy in two courts and was involved in lawsuits with the other two people–none of which Vallabhaneni mentioned. On the very day he was to be released for hitting his ex-wife, Yoder was handcuffed and driven to the Chester center.

Yoder didn’t have a trial until the following month. Judge William Schuwerk Jr. heard the case. An ill-prepared public defender represented Yoder, and he allowed Vallabhaneni to assert without proof that Yoder had committed “several” assaults in prison. Schuwerk, who failed to mention that he himself had prosecuted Yoder’s first commitment in 1982, ruled from the bench that Yoder should go to the asylum again.

Yoder filed his own appeal. The appellate judges noted a series of government mistakes in the case and overturned the commitment order, which should have freed Yoder. But their ruling came too late: commitment orders expire after six months, and another judge had already signed a new one, based on the original evidence that Yoder was ill and dangerous, along with new charges that Yoder had been an irascible, uncooperative patient at Chester. Ironically, Stephen Hardy, the warden Yoder had beaten in court, had become the director of Chester in 1986. Yoder hasn’t left the facility since he returned.

If someone as ill-tempered as Rodney Yoder lived in a different place–say, New York City–his life might have followed a different path. He might be the loud guy who bugs you on the subway or one of the city’s wearisome politicians. Instead, he lives in rural Illinois, and it is the citizens of Randolph County who form the juries that decide every year or two whether he should stay at the institution. Randolph is a place where the newspaper lists the Parish Hall’s Sunday chicken dinners on page 2. The creator of the cartoon character Popeye was born in the town of Chester in 1894, and its major annual event is a picnic next to a 900-lb. bronze statue of the sailor man. Popeye’s innocent charm somehow coexists with Chester’s other landmarks, the Menard prison and the Chester Mental Health Center next door. Of the town’s 8,400 residents, more than 3,000 are incarcerated. Some of the mental hospital’s residents are quite disturbed: one patient was recently convicted of murder for slicing up his mother and two sisters in 1996.

I wanted to ask state psychiatrists how it could be therapeutic for Yoder, who served his time for two relatively minor crimes, to live among killers. Yoder signed authorizations for me to speak with both the psychiatrist and the psychologist at Chester who do most of his evaluations. The facility declined. “[The medical director] feels that discussing cases with reporters can hurt treatment,” said Tom Green, spokesman for the state department of human services, which oversees Chester. But the department then changed its position and asked me to speak with Dr. Christopher Fichtner, one of its administrators in Chicago. Yoder wouldn’t authorize me to speak with Fichtner about his case, since Fichtner isn’t his doctor and has little role in routinely recommitting him.

Yoder often gets into such spats with the state. Their mutual animosity became routine in the ’90s: every few months, Yoder went to court either because the state wanted to recommit him or because he had sued someone. An ineffective public defender usually represented him, and the same couple of state doctors testified against him. (Yoder couldn’t afford his own lawyers and experts.) The same two or three judges overseeing his commitment trials would also toss out many of his lawsuits, even those complaining about his treatment at Chester.

At his commitment trials, Yoder only once had an aggressive private attorney, Edward Unsell of suburban St. Louis, Mo. Unsell called clinical psychologist Michael Armour to the stand in 1993. A supervisor at the big state hospital in St. Louis, Armour had been a witness for the state the year before, but he had changed his mind about Yoder when he actually spoke with him the following year. (His previous testimony had been based only on a review of Yoder’s file.) “I had testified against him… and yet he was very appropriate in his dealings with me,” Armour said in court. He noted that “Yoder appears to wage a war of words” but said he didn’t expect Yoder to actually carry out violence.

Nonetheless, the jury sent Yoder back to Chester. Cuneo, the state psychologist, had testified that Yoder was bipolar and delusional and that he had a history of violence. Given a choice between two competing experts, the jury played it safe. Who wants to be responsible for loosing a madman? Yoder repeatedly faced this conundrum in court–convincing jurors he was sane from inside an asylum. The state had a strong case: jurors heard about Yoder’s battery of women. They heard about the time he got into a scuffle with a guard and bit him. They heard about incidents when he became agitated and had to be secluded. They heard that Yoder always refused to take psychiatric drugs.

But jurors never heard that Yoder had been given multiple, seemingly haphazard diagnoses. For instance, bipolar disorder was diagnosed in 1991, but that diagnosis vanished from his records in 1998–even though Yoder never took part in treatment. Jurors also never heard from one of Unsell’s potential witnesses, a Chester employee who wouldn’t testify for fear of losing his job. That employee, who retired not long ago from his position as a guard supervisor but still fears retribution if identified, told me that Chester staff members sometimes provoke Yoder in hopes that he will become violent and provide grist for his next commitment hearing. “[The administration] had a vendetta against him because he beat them in court,” says the former supervisor. “Some guards take his property. They taunt him.” The ex-employee says Yoder never started fights on his unit. “I’m an ex-police officer. I know violence. Rodney’s not violent.”

After a while, Yoder all but gave up on the courts–and then got creative. A decade earlier, he had been transferred out of Chester to federal custody to be prosecuted for sending threatening mail. So now he tried the same tactic. He says the letters weren’t sincere and were intended only to get him sent to federal prison. That strategy may seem silly–or nuts–but a Chester psychologist wrote a report in 1993, before most of the letters were sent, that clearly outlined what Yoder expected from the letters and the consequent trip to federal prison: “1. greater freedom, 2. association with non-demented individuals, 3. earning an income…, 4. having a definite release date.”

The letters themselves range from terrifying to ludicrous. “I have worked out a half a dozen methods to kill someone,” says a 1993 letter to a judge. “I don’t want to do this. But if I must to end a lifetime of torture, I believe I can.” A 1996 letter claims he had “solicited [a local woman’s] murder from two Iranian nationals … The contract is already purchased.” Similar letters went to “maybe 100” people, Yoder says. He says he often wrote them with a carbon sheet underneath and sent copies to prosecutors. In 1996, Yoder even sued a prosecutor for not charging him; a judge had to remind Yoder that he “has no constitutional right to be prosecuted.” He stayed at Chester.

By then, the relationship between him and the facility was poisoned–and not only because Yoder never cooperated with treatment. Equip for Equality, a Chicago-based nonprofit for the disabled, has twice accused Chester of making false entries in Yoder’s records; Chester staff allegedly lied in the 1999 reports by saying Yoder had called an Equip for Equality office and threatened violence. At the time, Chester director Hardy stood by the first report. He never responded to the second and now says he doesn’t recall the incident.

Whatever the truth, it’s doubtful that even if Yoder is sick, he could heal in such an environment. In 1998, a state commission that investigates complaints for the disabled issued a harsh report on Chester. It said the facility’s treatment goals for Yoder–which he must meet in order to leave–were “vague and unobtainable.” The commission said it “does not believe that Chester has done all that is necessary to determine if [Yoder] is appropriately placed.” Hardy counters that no other hospital in the state is equipped to care for someone so dangerous. He also points out that the national organization that accredits hospitals gave Chester a 91% compliance rating in 2001.

Dr. Thomas Szasz has been the most controversial psychiatrist in the nation for years, so perhaps it’s no shock that he has become Yoder’s biggest defender. Born in Budapest, Szasz, 82, immigrated to the U.S. in 1938. He has been a psychiatry professor at the State University of New York for nearly 46 years. Szasz’s most famous book, The Myth of Mental Illness, was published in 1961. As the Atlantic Monthly said, the book argued “that both our uses of the term ‘mental illness’ and the activities of the psychiatric profession are often scientifically untenable and morally indefensible.” Szasz views mental illness as a metaphor for disturbing and disruptive behaviors, which he says arise from our circumstances and personality–and from our own choices. Until there is incontrovertible proof that, say, paranoid personality disorder is caused by an actual lesion in the brain, Szasz will argue such a label is a mere characterization of bad behavior that shouldn’t carry the force of law.

Although he once enjoyed great influence, Szasz is usually dismissed as a crank these days. His foes say he opposes all psychiatry or that he wants to free even incompetent patients who can’t feed themselves. Neither is true. But at a time when psychiatry’s power has grown dramatically–when it seems normal to grow up taking Ritalin and then graduate to Prozac, when even shyness is treated with pharmaceuticals–his views are worth revisiting. And the Yoder case offers an ideal venue in which to do so.

As academics go, psychiatrists are a lot like economists: their field is presented to the public as pure science, but there’s a lot of shouting in the back office. Are drugs overused? Can treatment really work if it’s involuntary? Is something like “delusional disorder” a brain disease or a behavioral problem or both? These debates are far from settled. Sometime in the past decade, it became a requirement of polite conversation to say that schizophrenia and other mental illnesses are “no different” from pneumonia. But the latest neurological research has offered only the roughest idea of the precise mechanism by which a disease such as schizophrenia arises. Scientists are decades away from being able to use a brain scan to diagnose something like Yoder’s alleged personality disorders.

By the late 1990s, Yoder had immersed himself in such ideas. Because of his views, Szasz is often contacted by disgruntled patients–“there have been thousands,” he sighs. But Yoder was different. “He’s extraordinary in the amount of information he amassed,” says Szasz. The psychiatrist was impressed that Yoder had tried to go to prison rather than Chester, since Szasz has argued for decades that it’s more humane to imprison lawbreakers for a set number of years rather than forcibly treat them in a mental hospital indefinitely.

Yoder’s calls and letters touched many. Reporter George Pawlaczyk of the Belleville News-Democrat began writing stories about Yoder, and other papers followed. A columnist for the Natal Witness, South Africa’s oldest newspaper, took up Yoder’s cause. So did Dr. Patch Adams. Adams worked in the er at St. Elizabeths, a Washington mental hospital, during the ’70s and ’80s. Previously, in 1963, he was himself a patient at a psychiatric hospital for two weeks. He says he learned more from fellow patients than the distant doctors, and he felt a personal connection to Yoder’s case. “I wasn’t bullied by his intensity, as I think many are,” he says.

Bullied, annoyed–or frightened. Most folks wouldn’t appreciate Yoder’s insistent calls; he can rant if he doesn’t get quick action. Chester now prohibits Yoder from calling at least a dozen people who have complained about his phone manners. Even Equip for Equality, the nonprofit that accused Chester of writing spurious reports on Yoder, reluctantly told the facility earlier this year that Yoder had begun making inappropriate calls. Group officials say he left a message in January in which he promised to “f___ you up the ass in the newspapers” for not fighting hard enough for him.

In his vulgar way, Yoder actually had a point. Although it is a large, federally funded organization designed to monitor institutions like Chester, Equip for Equality has never investigated the facility–even after it discovered those allegedly false reports. For years, some patients’ advocates have complained that Chester provides inadequate care. Just in the past year, a state commission has substantiated charges that Chester has improperly confiscated patients’ property, denied their privacy and failed to keep one patient from spreading his feces around a bathroom until Chester’s human-rights committee got involved. “We’ve had longstanding, very serious concerns about Chester,” admits Barry Taylor, Equip’s legal director. “But we have limited resources.”

Chester’s worst failure may be Yoder himself, a man who–according to the facility–hasn’t improved under its care. If Yoder is paranoid, certainly the worst approach is to omit information from his record and violate the painstaking procedures for committing someone. (Appellate judges have overturned three of Yoder’s 13 commitment orders because of improprieties.) Some argue that Chester officials aren’t so much hostile toward Yoder as negligent. “My fear is that they just don’t care enough about Rodney to take any action,” says Mark Heyrman, a Chicago law professor who once represented Yoder. “If Yoder is mentally ill and does not recognize that, then they need to medicate him. If he’s not mentally ill, they should let him go. But they know when they have to do anything with him, it’s going to be a big hairy mess.”

Will Yoder ever get out? One could imagine a treacly Patch Adams and a fiery Thomas Szasz swaying a jury. But state officials will argue that everyone else is better off with Yoder behind Chester’s 14-ft. fence. They will say his failure to cooperate with treatment is evidence of his illness, which, even if misdiagnosed in the past, still exists. “The system is not perfect,” says Vallabhaneni, the psychiatrist who wrote Yoder’s incomplete commitment evaluation in 1991. “But that doesn’t change the real picture of what Rodney Yoder is: he is very, very ill.” Even Hardy admits that “there have been some mistakes made along the way, and you can say those mistakes may have exacerbated his condition. But he shouldn’t leave there.” Some state lawyers have privately argued that by holding Yoder for so long, the state is turning him into a martyr. But Hardy and Vallabhaneni point out that Chester will be blamed if Yoder is freed and hurts someone.

For his part, Yoder imagines living out his years in a little chalet on a Vermont mountain. “I could write about psychiatry and send people cranky e-mails,” he says with a grin. He says he has no intention of harming anyone. It’s unclear what impact the decision in his case will have on the broader issue of patients’ rights. If he wins, the “psychiatric survivors” movement may have a new poster boy, and other states might look more carefully at patients who may be sick or may just be antisocial. Of course, finding the line between the two is the trick. What Yoder may tell us is that we’re a long way from figuring out the difference between being ill and being a jerk.