Kathyanita,

I would hope that the answer to your question would have been self evident from the letter itself. But if not, I'll tell you.

Because most psychiatric professionals and most of the lay-public appear to be clueless about its reality and wind up being unwitting cogs in its machinery in terms of misunderstanding and false diagnosis, owing to the traditional assumptions surrounding schizophrenia, delusion and paranoia. Because the relative few who believe they know something about it have been sold on some carefully cultivated propaganda that it is for use on predators and upon unstable, potentially violent and evil people, when in fact it appears (to me at least) to represent a kind of clandestine conservative revolution that approaches absolute power. Because it represents a total suspension of a chance at a fair self defense and due process, which every last one of you would expect to enjoy should you ever require it someday. Because there have certainly been suicides and destroyed lives resulting from these tactics and no accountability or honest explanations offered for those losses. Because I've seen ten years of my own life, my reputation and career destroyed under false, exaggerated and aggravated and cleverly clandestine circumstances by these things with noone to simply ask, 'Why?'. Noone who must be both responsible for both their having heard the question and responsible for their response, anyway. Because an elder PhD and friend, the kind you would never expect to do such a thing at all, put a bullet in his head on top of Kennesaw Mountain apparently under suspiciously similar circumstances.

I'm here to tell you that these things are real AND that virtually anyone can be tossed into one of these kill-boxes, because there is absolutely no defense against them. If one of your friends or loved ones were being hit with these tactics (and you actually believed the truth of what they were emphatically trying to tell you), wouldn't you want it stopped? Wouldn't you want to be able to do something to help them?

To what end. I suppose 'justice', 'fairness' and 'Constitution' are the short answers to your question.