(10 of 10)
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.