Minority Pre-Crime Report on Coercive Psychiatry in the Netherlands

Rosenhan's 1973 experiment, without the fraud. A man walks into a locked ward on purpose in 2024, with a camera, and the State's own records show a system that cannot tell sane from ill. And worse. A man walks, knowingly, into a locked psychiatric ward — because he has already read the grounds that will be written against him. What follows is not his word against the State's. It is the State's own record, set against itself: an illness dated eleven years into the past by a source who denies ever saying it; a man told he is there "voluntarily" eight times in half an hour, while an arm bars the door; a published book entered as a symptom of the delusion the file invents. In the Netherlands a citizen can be held for years over what a file predicts he might do, never over anything he has done. A change planned for 2027 would let such orders run for seven years without a hearing. This report does not mainly argue that the law was broken. It makes an older claim: lawful or not, this ought not to be done to a human being. Huib Kraaijeveld survived Dutch coercive psychiatry twice. The second time he walked in on purpose, with a camera.