Some news first, since this is supposed to be an announcement: my work has been nominated for the Assange Award. The ceremony is September 12th and I shall thus start practising to convincingly look like the complete idiot as I am labeled in over a 1000 pages of official files.

An award named after a man falsely accused and later locked up for the crime of showing people what was already true is, I admit, a touch on the nose. That is more or less the profession I have been into over sixteen years: showing people what is hidden behind the facade of ‘medical science’ and told — with enormous institutional confidence — that I must be mentally unwell for insisting on it.

In my own words: I’m a Bullshit Artist & Coincidence Theorist, with an abundance of materials. Yet according to roughly sixty professionals across twelve institutions, I am supposed to be a dangerous, racist, paranoid, women-molesting, child-killing, dangerous-driving and puppy-raping confused man who knows no one and has achieved nothing in his miserable little life.

My occupation, as officially recorded in one psychiatric file in 2024, is: “playing with children and petting dogs.” I regard this as the most fitting and honourable job description ever. You can find my actual accomplishments on LinkedIn or Patreon, should you desire a more subtle contrast.

I am also, the file insists, an antisemite — which will come as rather a surprise to my mother’s side of the family, most of whom did not return from the sort of place these methods were first perfected in Poland. When a system calls the grandson of Holocaust victims a Jew-hater to keep him locked up, you are no longer dealing with a ‘diagnosis’, but with a reflex Jennifer Freyd described as DARVO. The label is never the most falsifiable one available; it is the most destructive one within reach.

So let me tell you a small anecdote about hysteria in our current Interesting Times.

A foresight by a former member of parliament

In 2005 a member of parliament gave an interview to a Dutch newspaper NRC with a title that can now be regarded as prophetic: “Lonely in Times of Hysteria.” Somehow it amused me, so I kept a paper copy of it in my archives. She was worried back then about a new security apparatus taking shape, which later became the NCTV (national coordinator for counter-terrorism and safety). Her literal words about a reflex she found intolerable were: “I have very great difficulty with the fact that the rule of law is chucked out of the window the moment it doesn’t suit us.”

I agreed with her then and I still do. She was entirely right and I studied it for the last six years in an institutional shape. Those into spirituality can call my unorthodox methods of action research ‘Dark Work’, if you wish.

There is only one small complication she did not foresee in 2005. After becoming Mayor of Amsterdam in 2018, I can no longer mention her name when I address the members of the Council in City Hall. So as a courtesy I will refer to her only as She Who Must Not Be Named. In June 2020 the records show that she signed the emergency order to have me committed for four months into forced psychiatry.

This followed a call from the Ministry of Justice to the institution, where a “medical statement” was hastily assembled in roughly eleven minutes — from another address — while I sat waiting in a cell, arrested under a false name, with no explanation, and had to wash my feet in the toilet bowl. She signed it off that very same minute.

So the rule of law was not so much thrown out of the window as launched like a ballistic missile. Bravo!

I hold no grudge, but something more useful: a quotation and a signature, fifteen years apart, from the same hand. One warns against hysteria. The other is what hysteria looks like when it is finally your turn to be in a position of power, without any external checks and balances.

Two doors, one logic

Here is the comparison worth taking home, because it is the whole point of the research I will soon make public. The NCTV and the Wet verplichte GGZ — our forced-mental-health law — are cousins. Both are preventive. Both promise to save us from a harm that hasn’t happened yet. And both, to manage it, quietly cancel the oldest deal in a free society: that the state must prove something before it takes your freedom away. Montesquieu once had the nice idea to separate powers and I think it’s high time to dust it off once more.

The NCTV watches you as a possible terrorist and can lock you up in prison, simply based on feeble grounds, such as ‘suspicious’ coconut milk in your freezer. The Wvggz detains you as a possible danger — based on nothing but “suspicions, rumours, signals” reported by anonymous sources, as its own jailors say with a straight face, to then make up some chicque ‘diagnosis’ to make your detention look legitimate and isolate you from your social surroundings who will back off in fright (and blame you for it, of course).

No body, no weapon, no motive, no judge. To lock a man up under criminal law for planning to ritually slaughter five children with a Japanese sword — a genuine accusation in my files — you would need, at the very least, evidence. In forced care you need only the word suspicion. My health file contains eighty notes beginning with exactly that word. Eighty suspicions with zero proofs any independent body was ever obliged to weigh.

The terrorism apparatus at least has the decency to look like itself. The psychiatric one wears a white coat and a fancy title, so that the identical manoeuvre — detention on a hunch, indefinitely renewable, behind a door marked Care — keeps a faint medical perfume. Same logic, different label. In my strange country we once had a nice commercial for toilet cleaning liquid to show their self-fulfilling logic: We of WC Duck advise WC-Duck. I would rather drink WC Duck liquid than be forced taking psychiatric ‘medication’ again, by the way.

A girl in hiding in Amsterdam in 2026.

Let me make it concrete, because abstractions are how we sleep through these things. I ‘adopted’ daughter, of sorts, whom I found in there during the ten weeks in 2024, when I went back in to voluntarily do my White Witold action-research. She has been locked in there for three years now and her life is so ruined at age 21, that she wanted to get euthanasia last summer out of sheer despair. Let’s not… so I went to work for her since then.

I call her Avital — gift of God — which is accurate, since she still has a great deal to give the world, provided she survives this ‘care’ a little longer. She is Jewish, highly gifted and kind. In May she fled and did the only thing left to her. She went into hiding. In Amsterdam. In 2026.

Not from a German occupier, like my mother in 1942, but from the Dutch “zorg.” Read that sentence again and notice how little has changed except the century and the letterhead. A Jewish girl, hidden in this city, to escape people with clipboards who are quite sure it is all ‘for her own good’. The system calls this ‘care avoidance’, yet I actually believe it to be life-saving. So I am, against every reasonable instinct, proud of her — because going underground was her only way to take back authority over her own life she had left. Other than jumping.

Why a prophecy by the current Mayor?

So Mayor She Who Must Not Be Named of Amsterdam did choose the right words in 2005. Hysteria is quiet. It is a locked door, a new diagnosis each month, concocted grounds to keep one locked in, a checklist for brushing your teeth to prove that - someday - you may have a life again, and a system that reads every objection as further proof of the illness that justifies the door. When Avital wanted to file a complaint, she was simply put in isolation for months. It is lonely in there indeed, as I know from experience.

That is the loneliness she named in 2005, safely, in a newspaper. I can now file the same report from the other side of those closed walls, where it is markedly less theoretical — and Avital can file it from an address she cannot give.

So my work is nominated for an award for documenting what many simply refuse to see, including most members of Parliament. So am I both honoured with this nomination as well as glad with it, because it will increase the visibility of my work and a concept Law I wrote to prevent this from ever happening again. Already as a soccer player I didn’t fancy trophies much, but I did mind how we played.

And if the result of this current ‘serious game’ is that more people are becoming un-lonely and that Avital can come out of hiding, then that is enough reward for me personally during these antisocial, hysterical times called the ‘New Normal’.

Onwards & upwards now, after six years of doing the Dark Work that was needed to disturb new legislation that will give my State system the complete mandate - like Stalin and Beria had in the former Soviet-Union which was well documented by my HRD colleague Robert van Voren from Amsterdam too - to lock up every dissident citizen for seven years, without any functional external oversight left.

So the title of my next article will be: ‘Welcome to Siberia at Sea; seven years all-inclusive with a paper ankle band’. It will first be published in Dutch and then translated, so the world can have a look what Double Dutchness is going on around here - in this far too flat country in which the lunatics have clearly taken over the asylums.

So stay tuned for exciting new episodes of this ‘Prison Break from the Cuckoo’s Nest’ series, via this Substack channel or on Patreon. Facebook kicked me off in December last year - on the grounds I would be twelve years old, while stealing 1,200 euros for ‘paid cancelling’ months later - so there is yet another clue why the nomination may fit. As Frank Zappa once put it: “I figure the odds be 50/50 I might have something to say”.

If you are able and willing to support my work financially, that is also very welcome as Avital has to live on 30 euros a week - well below the official poverty level in this ‘caring’ State - because the system leeches ninety percent of her income to pay for her own detention. Does the term ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ ring a bell? Here is one on State level!

So of course I did my HRD work for her without any payment, so support is appreciated. You can do so via Patreon or this still functioning GoFundMe page. Patreon is paying out again, while Stripe blocks all I do here - except post these longreads for free.

‘Free’ seems to have become a word with many paradoxical meanings… as an afterthought.

Cheers,

Huib Kraaijeveld from Amsterdam

PS. an update on my plans for 2026 can be found here.

The documentation behind these claims — the file, the recordings, the 2020 committal order (with its eleven-minute medical statement), etcetera — is available on request and set out in the accompanying parliamentary briefing.

“Avital” is a pseudonym. The institution refuses to hand over her own files to her, which I need to study her case as HRD. And which may also interest the NCTV? What might they be hiding in that Hell Hole?

The Halsema quotation is cited from the NRC Handelsblad interview “Eenzaam in tijden van hysterie” - on 12 March 2005 - about the counter-terrorist measures then proposed and now reality in the New Normal since March 2020. She now probably has no ‘active memories’ of it; so glad I kept the clipping.

Ik hoop dat Putin ons redt van het komende wetsvoorstel WvGGZ! En dat rijmt.

Dat is niet de zin waarmee je een serieus stuk begint. Het is ook niet serieus bedoeld. Het is een grap die alleen werkt als je weet wat er aan voorafgaat — en als je die context kent, is het niet meer grappig. Hier is die context.

De man die vanuit Amsterdam de Sovjet-psychiatrie naar huis joeg

Robert van Voren is een Nederlander. Geboren in Montreal, opgegroeid in Amsterdam, bracht hij de jaren tachtig door met reizen naar de Sovjet-Unie als koerier — humanitaire hulp naar binnen, informatie over politieke gevangenen in psychiatrische instellingen naar buiten.

Het mechanisme dat hij documenteerde heette вялотекущая шизофрения — sluggish schizophrenia, langzaam voortschrijdende schizofrenie. De diagnose was een uitvinding van psychiater Andrei Snezhnevsky, ontwikkeld in opdracht van de KGB. Op zijn covert verzoek werden dissidenten geflitst naar psychiaters, die vervolgens een diagnose leverden. Geen rechtbank. Geen bewijs. Een aantekening in een dossier.

De symptomen van deze officiële Sovjet-diagnose:

• Reformistische wanen — geloven dat het systeem moet veranderen

• Overgewaardeerde ideeën — overtuigingen vasthouden ondanks druk

• Strijd voor de waarheid — documenteren en rapporteren blijven

• Litigieus gedrag — klachten indienen, juridische wegen bewandelen

• Antisociaal gedrag — niet conformeren aan verwachte sociale rollen

Dit zijn psychiatrische symptomen. Officieel gecodeerd. Gebruikt om mensen op te sluiten.

Van Voren’s campagne leidde ertoe dat de Sovjet-Unie in 1983 uit de World Psychiatric Association werd gedwongen. Vanuit Amsterdam. Een Nederlander die het Kremlin ter verantwoording riep voor het gebruik van psychiatrie als politiek wapen.

Mooi verhaal. En nu de grap.

Lees de symptomen lijst nog een keer

Reformistische wanen. Overgewaardeerde ideeën. Strijd voor de waarheid. Litigieus gedrag. Antisociaal gedrag.

Als u in Nederland gedwongen wordt opgenomen en u protesteert, bewijst u uw stoornis. Als u documenten opvraagt, bent u litigieus. Als u een klacht indient, heeft u overgewaardeerde ideeën over uw eigen situatie en bent u ‘verward’. Als u blijft volhouden dat u onschuldig bent, heeft u reformistische wanen. Als u niet meewerkt, bent u antisociaal.

Er is geen officiële Nederlandse diagnose die dit met name noemt. Er is ook geen KGB die psychiaters belt. Dat heet nu het OM, zoals bleek in juni 2020. Maar de structurele logica — waarbij elk bewijs van gezond verstand als symptoom van ziekte wordt gelezen — is identiek. De Britten hebben hiervoor een uitdrukking: same difference. Oftewel: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

De vier voorwaarden

Van Voren heeft zijn leven besteed aan de vraag waarom punitieve psychiatrie blijft bestaan na het einde van de Sovjet-Unie. Zijn antwoord is niet ideologisch maar structureel. Je hebt geen communistisch regime nodig. Je hebt vier condities nodig:

1. Geen externe toetsing van diagnoses. De instelling die iemand opsluit stelt ook de diagnose, beheert het dossier, behandelt de klacht, en informeert de rechter. Er is geen buitenstaander in dit circuit.

2. Financiering die institutioneel gedrag stuurt. In de Nederlandse GGZ wordt de DBC-code — die de financiering bepaalt — pas ná opname vastgesteld. De instelling heeft een economische prikkel om mensen op te nemen en opgenomen te houden.

3. Professionals zonder ethische rem. Niet omdat psychiaters slecht zijn. Maar in een hiëarchische instelling stemt iedereen mee met de leidinggevende. Wie niet meewerkt, wordt ontslagen. Wie protesteert, verlaat de in-group. Milgram heeft uitgelegd waarom mensen stroomstoten geven als een autoriteit dat vraagt. In de GGZ is de witte jas de autoriteit. De stroomstoot is nu je hand opsteken bij ‘democratische diagnosticering’.

4. Autoriteiten die zich veilig genoeg voelen. Dit is de meest subtiele conditie. Zolang er externe druk is — van media, van rechters, van internationale instanties — opereren instellingen voorzichtig. Zodra die druk wegvalt, wordt de grens verlegd. Daarom gebruikt men ook een wettelijk instrument om mensen op te sluiten - de GAF score - die al sinds 2013 door de APA zelf uit de DSM V is verwijderd als ‘te subjectief’. De VN noemt dit overigens ‘arbitrary detention’, maar Nederland lapt toch alle VN rapporten aan zijn klompen.

Vink ze maar aan voor Nederland anno 2026: 100%…

Het amendement als thermometer

Er ligt een wetswijziging bij de Raad van State. Artikel 8:9, lid 6 van de Evaluatiewet Wvggz schrapt de verplichting om iemand te horen voordat een gedwongen maatregel wordt verlengd, als de situatie “ongewijzigd” is. Zeven jaar achtereen. Zonder dat iemand buiten het systeem ooit kijkt.

Dit is Van Vorens vierde conditie in wetgevingsvorm: de autoriteiten voelen zich veilig genoeg.

De besparing die het ministerie berekent: 5,1 miljoen euro. Minder dan 0,05 procent van het GGZ-budget van tien miljard.

De Bukovsky Archieven — de 4.500 pagina’s aan geheime KGB-documenten die Vladimir Bukovsky in 1992 kopieerde — bevatten een Politburo-document uit 1970 met KGB-voorstellen om psychiatrische opname van dissidenten massaal uit te breiden. Bureaucratisch. Ondertekend. Intern.

Het ziet er precies zo uit als een wetswijziging.

De cirkel

Van Voren joeg de Russen weg, vanuit Amsterdam.

Nu zijn de Russen er niet. Maar de condities die ze nodig hadden, zijn er wel. En zijn protocollen ingericht door mensen die Snezhnevsky nooit hebben gelezen, die de Bukovsky Archieven niet kennen, die oprecht geloven dat ze zorg verlenen.

Dat is misschien het meest verontrustende van de hele analyse: je hebt geen kwade opzet nodig. Je hebt vier condities nodig, goeie bedoelingen, een helpers-syndroom, groepsdruk en een amendement.

Ik hoop dus dat Putin ons redt van het wetsvoorstel WvGGZ!

Het rijmt. En het is de meest absurde zin die ik ooit met een recht gezicht heb geschreven — omdat de absurditeit niet in de zin zit, maar in de werkelijkheid die hem noodzakelijk maakt.

Binnenkort kan dus iedereen - net zoals ik - zeven jaar opgesloten worden, zonder dat er ooit nog een rechter naar kijkt.

Tenzij… Putin? Of wij?

Robert van Voren’s werk is toegankelijk via de Global Initiative on Psychiatry. De Bukovsky Archieven staan online op bukovsky-archive.com. Het Europees Parlement publiceerde in 2013 een rapport over punitieve psychiatrie in post-Sovjet landen — vijftien jaar geleden, over buurlanden.

Drs. Huib Kraaijeveld — sociaal psycholoog (UvA), business educator (Nyenrode) & human rights defender sinds 2010 in de corrupte wereldwijde gezondheidszorg.

Volgens de GGZ in 2024 is mijn eigenlijke beroep echter ‘spelen met kinderen en knuffelen met hondjes’.

Aan u wat u gelooft. Die Hogepriesters of een dissident.

In January 1973, David Rosenhan published his landmark study “On Being Sane in Insane Places”. His central finding was not merely that psychiatric hospitals misdiagnosed healthy people. It was structural: once inside the system, no behaviour could refute the diagnosis. Note-taking became “compulsive writing behaviour.” Asking questions became “paranoid ideation.” Everything the seven pseudo-patients and Rosenhan himself did was filtered through the label and added to the file.

Rosenhan’s critics later pointed out two weaknesses. Robert Spitzer argued that the pseudo-patients had introduced a false signal — they had reported hallucinations that didn’t exist. Susannah Cahalan demonstrated in 2019 that Rosenhan’s own documentary record was thinner than his paper claimed.

Both critiques require a different study design: one in which the subject introduces no false signal, and in which the institution — not the subject — holds the pen.

What follows is that study design, conducted not in 1973 but in 2024, not in America but in Amsterdam, and not by a psychologist deploying himself and seven pseudo-patients, but by a social psychologist - born in 1971 around the time when Rosenhan walked in psychiatry - who also walked into the institution himself, on purpose, with a straight spine, his wits and sense of humor sharpened, and with a recording device.

The four acts below are documented. Three are verbatim transcripts. The fourth is a court record. The institution produced them all. I am the subject.

Act I: Voluntary (23 July 2024)

I had been invited for what the Crisis Team called a “voluntary de-escalation conversation.” I knew what it was. I already packed my bag and a crate of books, arranged for my cats to be fed, sent a time-stamped picture to my friends as sign I went in voluntarily, invited my lawyer Arthur and my friend Paul — a former chief of Amsterdam Police — as witnesses, and turned on my recorder. The conversation opened with 2020 case manager Quincy establishing the terms:

Quincy: You are here voluntarily. You can leave at any time.

Huib: Then I’ll leave.

Quincy: If you walk out, the situation may escalate on the street, and then we enter a forced context.

This exchange took place within the first ten minutes. The word “voluntary” appeared nine more times in the following half hour, each time paired with a consequence for non-compliance. The word ‘de-escalation plan’ was however never mentioned.

No diagnosis was presented. A treatment plan was proposed. The plan included medication. When I asked what the diagnosis was, the ANIOS described it as a “working hypothesis” and admitted he never read the complaints. When I asked who had made the diagnosis and when, Quincy said: “You can request all data from your file. That is a different conversation.” I was not permitted to leave for a cigarette break without supervision. When I asked why:

Quincy: This is not a free location.

At the end of the conversation, a guard entered the room with seven colleagues. My arm was twisted, I was dragged out of the room in front of my friends and placed in an isolation cell. My phone was handed to Paul. The last frame of his recording shows his face: flabbergasted. Paul and Arthur were then asked if they wanted a drink, while their friend was dragged off.

This is what the Wvggz — the Dutch Compulsory Mental Health Care Act — calls a voluntary context.

Act II: Independent (4 September 2024)

After six weeks of forced detention, I was visited by a psychiatrist (Geneesheer Directeur) named Dr. S, introduced as an independent assessor. His assessment was a statutory requirement before the court could extend my detention into a formal Care Order the following day. Dr. S did the same with me in 2020 and is currently committing the same crimes in the Kafkaesk process of a young lady whose human rights I am defending since July 2025.

Dr. S opened by explaining that he had already read the file and spoken with my treating psychiatrist, Maarten.

Dr. S: I’ve been asked to do the assessment — and I’ve already spoken to Maarten and read some things in the file. Because that’s also what one does, when you’re asked for an independent assessment.

Really? He was employed by Arkin — the same institution as Maarten. His report was done the day before the court hearing it was meant to inform. He filed it after the hearing.

The assessment lasted approximately eight minutes. After six weeks in which no staff member had asked about my home situation:

Huib: Jim van Os prescribed me a Doberman as ‘proper treatment’ in his 2020 second opinion.

Dr. S: There aren’t dogs sitting at home waiting, are there? Not that we would be in time…

Huib: You are the first person in this entire system who has asked that.

Dr. S.: Hahaha.

Huib: That was not a joke.

His GAF score assessment: 40–50. My counter-evidence, including a written second opinion by Professor Jim van Os — Professor of Psychiatry at UMC Utrecht, who had found no DSM diagnosis and no indication for medication in 2020 — was noted and set aside.

This is what the Wvggz calls an independent assessment.

Act III: Treatment (12 September 2024)

Seven weeks into my detention, my treating psychiatrist Dr. Marius came to discuss my medication. He walked past me in the corridor without noticing me there in a wheelchair. He did not greet me when he entered the room. His opening line:

Dr. Marius: Uhhhh, I wanted to talk to you about the medication, uhhh, because uhhh we’re going to go up a step.

Seven weeks in. First conversation of substance. No open question had been asked in all that time. I pointed this out:

Huib: HOW ARE YOU? It’s not that difficult, is it?

Dr. Marius: Well I am…

Huib: No — how am I. You haven’t asked me a single open question in seven weeks.

Dr. Marius: Well, uhhh… let’s do that now then. How are you?

Huib: Far too late….

During the conversation, Dr. Marius proposed increasing my Valproic acid dosage and adding a second medication — Zuclopenthixol — to shorten the admission. In doing so, he first named the wrong drug (Clozapine, a different medication in a different category) before correcting himself. The clinical basis for continued detention, when I pressed for it:

Dr. Marius: you are manic.

Huib: why?

Dr. Marius: because I feel you are manic.

Huib: BECAUSE? Give me some proper reasoning for a change. Something to do with logic: cause, context, facts, observations?

Dr. Marius: Well, uhhh — for example — the way you think is very fast. It goes from one thing to another.

Huib: That’s called associative thinking.

Dr. Marius: Associative, yes — that too.

Huib: You can’t follow it, so I must be insane — I understand that.

At the end of the conversation, I asked — as a deliberate provocation to close the pointless meeting — for the euthanasia procedure. It was a cynical joke to put him off balance. Dr. Marius did not recognise it as one.

Huib: I am done with this. So may I request the euthanasia procedure, as a more effective treatment?

It was entered into my file as evidence of suicidal ideation, and cited as grounds for continued detention.

(At this point, Professor Cees Hamelink entered the room.)

Huib: Look, Cees — I was just requesting euthanasia. You’re just in time.

Cees: No, it’s much too early for that…

I was released fourteen days later, after sixty-seven days of arbitrary detention.

Act IV: Accountability (October 2024)

After my release on 28 September 2024, I filed an appeal with the Court of Amsterdam identifying three procedural defects in my complaints committee hearing of September second: an Arkin psychiatrist seated as the “independent” member, the chair’s admission of demonstrably false evidence, and the committee’s refusal to return my primary documentation. The court ordered the false evidence removed from the legal case file. So I accused them of interfering with my human rights work.

The false evidence in question was the same evidence that had justified my detention from the beginning: that I had ‘raped a client’, that I had been dismissed from employment, that I had rent arrears. These three claims — none of which had any documentary foundation, all of which were contradicted by signed letters from my lawyer and my landlord that the GGZ court had allowed to disappear from the legal file — had been the operational basis for ten weeks of forced detention and five more weeks of forced medication.

The complaint about the court’s conduct had not been received, as I was told when I called later. In a functioning legal system, the retroactive removal of the evidentiary basis for a detention triggers a review of that detention. Under Dutch law as currently applied, it triggers nothing. The file continues. The diagnosis remains. The next extension proceeds on the same foundation, now minus the counter-evidence that was just thrown out.

The UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, in its Concluding Observations on the Netherlands published in September 2024 — the same month I was released — described this pattern as arbitrary detention incompatible with the CRPD. The Dutch parliament received those observations and responded by proposing to remove the procedural review that might, in theory, have caught it.

This is what the Wvggz calls accountability.

What the Institution Wrote About Itself

Spitzer’s critique of Rosenhan required that no false signal be introduced. I introduced none. I did not feign a hallucination. I did not conceal my professional history — thirty years of it were in the file before I arrived. The signals in the file were generated by the institutions: police reports describing shirtless football in a park during a heat wave as “mania,” my former professional fee of €500 per hour as “narcissism,” and an aikido technique (atemi) used in self-defence in 2020 to avoid my arm being twisted out of its socket as evidence that the violence was actually warranted and enough to ship me off as ‘danger to the ward’.

Cahalan’s critique required that the documentary anchor sit somewhere other than the witness’s own testimony. It does. The transcripts above are verbatim recordings. The falsified evidence in Act IV was removed by a court order — the institution’s own legal record. The falsification table documenting approximately 250 independently verifiable counter-facts is anchored to primary institutional records — court files, signed forms, video recordings, and self-contradictions within the institution’s own paperwork. Neither critique applies. The institution is the source.

Act IV adds another dimension Rosenhan’s passive design could not have produced: the system not only generating false evidence, but having that evidence formally removed — and continuing without adjustment. The loop does not correct. It simply continues, now without the evidence that started it.

Why This Matters Now

The Dutch parliament is preparing to vote on an amendment to the Wvggz, the law under which I was detained in 2020 and again - albeit voluntarily to do my undercover research - in 2024. The amendment’s central provision, Article 8:9 lid 6, exempts every “unchanged extension” of an existing crisis measure or care order from individual procedural review. The “unchanged extension” is the most common compulsory-care decision in the Netherlands.

When this new amendment is voted for, it will turn the Wvggz into the even more perfect circumvention of criminal law, where the principle still is that one is innocent until proven guilty. In ‘mental health care’ the reverse is true, as a Catch Net for all. Catch net is actually how these Chain partners (city health department, Police and psychiatry) call their system. Robert van Voren has a name for it: political abuse of psychiatry.

The independent assessment described in Act II above — conducted by an Arkin psychiatrist not willing to bite the hand that feeds him, after reading the file and consulting the treating physician upfront, with the report due after the hearing — is the procedural gate the amendment removes. On the evidence of these four acts alone, that gate is already barely functioning. The amendment makes its removal official policy, and prices it at €5.1 million in annual administrative savings. One hundred and eight days. Two years recovery time. Sixty-seven days and five more weeks of poisoning. Just four acts out of many. One dossier. The institutions involved wrote it.

A Note on GAF Scores

Dr. S assigned a GAF score of 40–50 at the conclusion of Act II. For reference, a GAF of 40–50 indicates serious impairment in social, occupational or school functioning. Two unsolicited assessments from outside the institution offer a different reading.

Arthur Schopenhauer, whose 1831 work The Art of Being Right catalogued 38 rhetorical stratagems for winning arguments without having them, would decline to use the GAF scale on the grounds that it is an instance of his own Stratagem 36 — the deployment of impressive-sounding terminology to substitute for reasoning. He would observe that a subject who, while under forced medication in a wheelchair on a closed ward, next to the one who just rammed his injured leg into a door on purpose, correctly identifies the rhetorical structure of every institutional move made against him, cites the applicable legal statute from memory, conducts a live methodology experiment, and closes the clinical encounter with a cynical joke precise enough to be mistaken for a clinical symptom — is operating at the upper limit of what his philosophy considers functional human cognition. He would not apply the instrument. The instrument cannot measure its own examiner.

Franz Kafka, whose bureaucratic fiction has long been misread as surrealist fantasy rather than documentary realism, would assign a GAF score of 49. Not because anything was wrong with the subject, but because in the system he documented, 49 is the number the institution needs. A score of 50 would trigger a mandatory review, a score of 48 would require immediate intervention, so 49 keeps the file open, the extensions running, and the paperwork in order — without requiring anyone to do anything differently.

Kafka would also note that the psychiatrist who assigned the score had already left the room at the end of July - offended - before writing it down. This was later cited before the judge that I had to remained locked in: “because I offended my psychiatrist Maarten”. Why? Because I asked if he knew who paid his salary, after I introduced myself in English as internal researcher for several Special Rapporteurs to the UN. Which was predictably completely ignored.

Huib Kraaijeveld MA is a social psychologist, human rights defender, and co-author of two reports submitted to UN Special Rapporteurs. He was detained under the Wvggz in 2020 (about 108 days) and 2024 (67 days), and is currently working as HRD for a young woman he found in there, in order to get her a life worth living after being detained for three years on no valid grounds at all.

This is the fourth and penultimate phase of his White Witold action research project, which started in 2010: to document how the system tries to discredit or destroy the life of a HRD and to take revanche on the one they control and claim to ‘care for’ - until her untimely and assisted death.

Her case has been already reported to the SR on Torture dr. Jill Edwards in November 2025. The Falsification Table documenting 249 counter-facts is available to invited reviewers under non-disclosure. Independent forensic review is scheduled for June 2026.

Appendix: Wvggz violations — 32 documented across three conversations within one hour

Article references are to the Wvggz as in force July–September 2024. All violations are drawn exclusively from the verbatim transcripts. No external claims. Each row is independently verifiable from the recordings. Average rate: more than one violation every two minutes across the three conversations combined. To quote Napoleon Bonaparte: “Never interrupt your enemies, while they are making mistakes”.

Act I — July 23, 2024 (TOA, “voluntary”) — 11 violations

The word “vrijwillig” (voluntary) was used 9 times by the system in 30 minutes — each time paired with a consequence for non-compliance. I used it 3 times, each time ironically, quoting it back. The isolation cell was reached within the same half hour, in which I used the walls to draw a mindmap of what I would do next.

Art. 1:4 “Vrijwillig” used 9 times as voluntary framing while simultaneously threatening with police and forced admission

Art. 7:1 Treatment plan proposed without prior diagnosis

Art. 7:2 Medication proposed without informed consent or valid diagnosis

Art. 5:9 No psychiatrist present; ANIOS conducting clinical assessment without having reviewed the available GGD complaints

Art. 5:13 ANIOS explicitly confirmed he had not reviewed the GGD complaints file before making any clinical assessment; apart from the fact that none was made at all

Art. 10:3 Patient not informed of his rights at start of contact

Art. 10:1 PVP (patient advocate) not mentioned or offered

Art. 8:9 Crisis measure applied without individual procedural review

Art. 8:12 Force used (arm twisted, isolation cell) without valid crisis measure in place at time

Art. 5:13 Diagnosis described only as “working hypothesis” and copied from 2020 files — insufficient basis for detention

Art. 3:3 Quincy introduced uncorrected and contested 2020 diagnosis as current clinical evidence without fresh assessment — a diagnosis itself built on a fabricated file since 2010

Intermezzo: Complaints hearing, September 2, 2024 

Prohibition on filming during a formal complaints procedure and a Swiss pocket knife taken away, as the judge ‘felt threatened’ by my symbolic gesture: have a conversation with the knife on the table

Psychiatrist Maarten repeated known false claims in the presence of documentary counter-evidence on the table

Declaration of incapacity (“wilsonbekwaamheid”) cited Maarten’s ‘feeling offended’ at being asked who paid his salary — used as clinical grounds for forced medication

Act II — September 4, 2024 (“independent assessment”) — 6 violations

Art. 5:17 Assessor employed by same institution as treating psychiatrist — not independent

Art. 5:17 Assessor had pre-read dossier and consulted treating psychiatrist before assessment

Art. 5:17 lid 3 Report due after the court hearing it was meant to inform

Art. 2:1 Counter-evidence (Van Os second opinion, 2020) noted and set aside without substantive engagement

Art. 8:9 ZM extension requested before independent assessment was completed

Art. 5:15 ZAG not yet organised at 6 weeks (legal right: within 3 weeks of admission)

Act III — 12 September 2024 (Marius, “treatment”) — 13 violations

Art. 5:15 ZAG still not organised at 7 weeks (legal right: within 3 weeks)

Art. 2:1 Patient’s opinion legally required to carry equal weight; systematically disregarded

Art. 7:1 No open question asked in 7 weeks — no therapeutic relationship established

Art. 7:2 Wrong medication named (Clozapine vs Valproïnezuur) before dosage increase — medication error on record

Art. 7:2 Second medication (Zuclopenthixol) added without substantive informed consent

Art. 3:3 Clinical basis for “manic episode”: “you think fast” — no substantive diagnostic reasoning

Art. 2:1 Dr. Marius dismissed documented counter-evidence (lawyer letters, landlord confirmation) as “die dingen” (those things) and continued acting on the claims they contradicted

Art. 8:9 Detention continued on fabricated grounds already contradicted by lawyer and landlord letters

Art. 10:5 Cynical joke entered as “suicidal ideation” and cited as grounds for continued detention

Art. 8:12 Wheelchair user placed in room inaccessible by wheelchair — physical neglect on record

Art. 8:12 Caregiver (Toon) rammed user’s injured leg into fire door — undisputed, unaddressed

Art. 7:3 Physical injury (ruptured calf muscle) not adequately treated despite repeated complaints

Art. 10:3 Conflicting reasons given for room transfer within same conversation — contradictory file entries

Total (current): 32 violations across 3 conversations within one hour. Rate: more than one violation every two minutes.

The institutional narrative requires that 32 independently documented counter-facts, each drawn from the institution’s own records, are all mistaken or coincidental. Under conservative assumptions — assigning each counter-fact only a 10% probability of occurring by chance under the null hypothesis that the institutional narrative is true — the compound probability of the narrative being correct is 0.1³², or one in 100 nonillion. This is a number so far below zero that standard scientific notation loses meaning as a practical descriptor.

For orientation: the estimated number of atoms in the observable universe is approximately 10⁸⁰. The compound probability here is 10⁻³². That means the odds that the institutional narrative is true are roughly equivalent to randomly selecting the same specific atom from the entire observable universe — four times in a row, correctly, on the first attempt each time. Full table (249 rows) available on request.

People keep asking me, in various ways: why did you put yourself inside that dangerous situation in July 2024? Why not stay outside of it to do research and change things? If you could see it coming, why not step away? The short answer is that I was trained for it — for forty years, across four disciplines, with two older traditions standing behind them — and when the moment arrived I walked into it on purpose, using a toolkit that those reading my file from the outside do not know I have. The long answer is what follows, and it is the only account that makes the subsequent events legible as something other than pathology.

What I actually do for a living

Until 2010, my specialties at Nyenrode Business University were three. Space holding: creating the container in which other people can work out their real questions — not the questions they are supposed to have, but the ones they actually have. A room held well produces work no curriculum could have predicted.

Tailored learning design: programs built around the participant’s real question, not around a syllabus and towards a degree. The starting point was always: what does this specific group, in this specific moment, need to get at that they cannot get at any other way?

The third was experiential learning alongside my colleagues. My contribution sat next to their academic content: Go (strategic patience and positional thinking), aikido (receiving force and redirecting it without breaking the attacker), whole-brain thinking (integration of analytical, intuitive, and embodied cognition), and Powerlab — the immersive simulation of complex social systems in which participants do not know they are inside a simulation, and the real dynamics of power emerge under pressure. All these are relevant to what happened in 2024.

After 2010, when I followed the shit that hit my fan after my first voluntary encounter with Dutch psychiatry, left Nyenrode and moved into what I came to call Lyme Lands or rather Wars — patient advocacy, the ICD-11 coding dispute, the Human Rights Defenders reports submitted to UN Special Rapporteurs — I added my own biographical experience to my professional one: professional soccer as a last defender as embodied game theory, aikido since a severe knee injury in 2000 as an embodied discipline rather than an academic reference and having lived through a persistent Lyme infection for 35 years until 2007. These last three matter much more than the CV suggests.

The four disciplines

A last defender on a soccer field is the player everyone else has already failed for. The striker has beaten the midfield. The midfield has beaten the wing-backs. The goalkeeper is alone behind you. Your job is not to chase the ball. Your job is to read the entire field several seconds before everyone else does, to position yourself where the play will be rather than where it is, and to step into the one gap that remains. In time.

Last defenders see the game in shapes and lines. Scoring is someone else's job. They know that an attack commits itself to a specific vector once it is past the halfway line, and that the right intervention is often not a direct tackle - leaving the way to the goalkeeper wide open if missed - but a repositioning that forces the attacker into the foot, the angle, the decision they didn’t want. If you play the position correctly, most of your work is invisible — the goal that didn’t happen is, by definition, nothing to watch. I kind of liked that invisibility, which early in my career turned out to be called ‘servant leadership’.

Aikido does not initiate. It receives. The entire art is built on the observation that an attack is a decision committed — the attacker has loaned you their centre of gravity, and the correct response is to accept the gift and pivot, so their own momentum carries them past you and to the ground. You don’t break them. You don’t oppose them. You align with the line they were already travelling, and extend it one step further than they intended to go. The deepest lesson in aikido is that you cannot do aikido with someone who is not really attacking. The art to defend oneself only exists in relation to an incoming force. It is entirely and explicitly responsive.

Go is the long strategic game. Moves that look weak at the point of play reveal, twenty moves later, the shape they were always setting up. Territory is not taken — it is implied by the stones you place, and by the stones your opponent is forced to place in response. A stone that looks like a sacrifice is often the most important stone on the board. You can only see this if you stop looking at the current exchange and look at the whole pattern.

Powerlab is the experiential simulation in which a complex social system — a company, a polity, an institution — is reproduced under controlled conditions with participants who are told they are in a business meeting, or a negotiation, or a governance exercise. What they are actually in is a field designed to surface the real power dynamics they cannot see when they are the fish inside the water of their own institution. The facilitators watch the system run itself. The participants only find out afterwards what they were actually doing.

The Void

Miyamoto Musashi — the Japanese swordsman who wrote Go Rin no Sho, the Book of Five Rings, at the end of his life in 1645 — closed the book with a fifth scroll he called the Void (Ku, 空). The preceding four scrolls described the disciplines of technique: ground, water, fire, wind. The Void is what happens when all four have been so completely internalised that they disappear. You no longer execute technique. You read the situation directly, without the intermediate layer of “what should I do now?” The Void is not emptiness as absence. It is the space that opens when you have stopped standing in your own way. And as Mushashi said: it cannot be explained in language.

You cannot enter the Void by deciding to. You enter it because you have trained long enough that the training is embodied into you, and at that point the training does the work without asking your permission. The last defender stepping into the gap is not thinking about last defenders or about looking good. The aikidoka receiving a grip, a punch or a sword cut is not thinking about pivots. The Go player laying a sacrificial stone is not thinking about Go theory or a quick win in a corner of the board. The Powerlab facilitator reading the room is not running a checklist. All four are in the Void. In sports this is often called ‘flow’.

Musashi’s point in the fifth scroll is specifically strategic: once you have passed through the four disciplines, you are released from all of them into a readiness that responds to the situation as it actually is, rather than as your chosen technique prefers it to be. “Taking the Void as the Way, you will see the Way as Void,” he writes — meaning, among other things, that the highest discipline is the one that has become indistinguishable from clear sight.

In July 2024 I went into the Void. That is the sentence that may sound most grandiose yet is most precise. I did not deliberate. I did not weigh options. I saw the play forming, I saw the one killing move (a Go terminology) that covered the whole field, and I played it, using myself as the piece. The training made the decision before I did. The only thing was that I had to muster up courage.

A precedent by Pilecki, 1940

There is a historical precedent for the move I am about to describe, and I want to place it on the record before I describe the move itself, because without the precedent the move looks like something invented under pressure. It was not.

In September 1940, Witold Pilecki — a cavalry officer of the Polish Army and a leader of the Polish underground resistance — deliberately allowed himself to be arrested during a German street roundup in Warsaw. He walked into the roundup, carrying a false identity card under the name Tomasz Serafiński, because he knew the people swept up in it were being sent to a new German camp called Auschwitz, and because the Polish resistance needed someone inside. He became prisoner number 4859.

He spent nearly three years in the camp, built the first resistance network inside it (ZOW, Związek Organizacji Wojskowej), smuggled intelligence reports out to the Polish Home Army and onward to the Western Allies, and in April 1943 escaped. His report, known now as Witold’s Report or the Pilecki Report, was one of the earliest detailed accounts of the systematic extermination programme to reach the West. The Polish Communist government executed him in 1948. The report was suppressed for decades.

Pilecki’s entry into Auschwitz was not a delusion. It was not a breakdown. It was not an impulsive act by a man who did not understand the danger. It was a military intelligence operation. He entered because the only way to obtain the evidence was to stand where the evidence was being produced, and to survive long enough to carry it out.

I want to be careful here, and more honest than the polite convention usually permits. I am indeed comparing my detention in psychiatry to Auschwitz. Not as equivalents in suffering, scale, or lethality — those differences are real, they are large, and they must be held steadily. I am comparing the two as members of the same structural category: the totalising institution in the technical sociological sense Erving Goffman named in 1961. Both label (the yellow star; the psychotic-spectrum ICD code). Both number (prisoner 4859; BSN plus file ID).

Both isolate (the camp; the locked ward plus social stigma). Both administer substances designed to break the subject (starvation and overt poisons; forced antipsychotics). Both make escape through the front door structurally impossible, because in both systems every act of resistance is metabolised by the institution as further justification for the regime it is already running against you. In Auschwitz that metabolism was overt. In psychiatry it is accomplished through the pen, DSM V codes and procedures.

What differs between the two is not structure nor thinking. It is register.

Psychiatry is the white “caring” version of the same apparatus, the polite, credentialled, comfortably middle-class Dutch professionals who administer it in soft therapeutic language with visible goodwill. There are no (uniformed) guards; there are clinicians in ordinary clothes who address you by your first name. There is no starvation (except from boredom and affinity); there is (lousy) food one gets for free . There is no barbed wire; there is a “voluntary” admission form you sign under duress. There is no extermination; there is a “treatment plan” with medication that produces a weight loss that is then cited as ground of getting locked up once more in order to prevent ‘danger’. Every element of the apparatus has been dressed in the vocabulary of care.

That register is not a mitigation. It is the mechanism by which this version of the institution becomes harder to refute than the overt one. Auschwitz was monstrous and legible as monstrous. Psychiatry is monstrous and perceived as care. Hannah Arendt’s formulation of the banality of evil applies more precisely to this institution than to the camps, because the camps required some degree of committed ideological violence to run, whereas psychiatry runs on ordinary professional decency meeting a file that absorbs every counter-fact as further evidence of itself. Most of the clinicians I encountered were not cruel. Most of them were kind. That is the problem.

Pilecki walked into a version of the apparatus that the outside world was eventually, painfully, forced to recognise as evil. I walked into a version of the apparatus that the outside world still reliably recognises as help. His report had to document that violence was occurring. Mine has to document that subtle violence is occurring dressed up as care. Both are intelligence operations inside totalising institutions. The white-gloved version of such an institution is not less dangerous than the overt one. It is more durable, because the outside world cannot see it for what it is. And my own concocted file - made in hindsight while erasing my actual medical files - can still be abused against me.

Both were designed by psychiatry

There is one further parallel I must name, because it is structurally the most important one, and the politeness that usually suppresses it is exactly the politeness this essay is about.

Both the Holocaust and modern mental health care were designed by the same profession. This is not a rhetorical flourish, but a historical claim documented in a substantial literature — principally Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors (1986) and Ernst Klee’s “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat (1983), with corroborating primary sources in the Nuremberg Medical Trial record.

The intellectual template for the extermination programme is a 1920 book co-authored by the jurist Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche, professor of psychiatry at Freiburg: Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens — Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life. The book argued, in explicitly medical language, that the termination of certain lives was not only permissible but therapeutically and economically rational. The racial hygiene laws were already lobbied for by psychiatry in 1929, well before Hitler came into power.

The operational architecture followed two decades later, under a psychiatric leadership that is not obscure. Ernst Rüdin, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry in Munich — the institution now renamed the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry — drafted the 1933 Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses, the legal basis for forced sterilisations. Werner Heyde, professor of psychiatry at Würzburg, was appointed head of T4 medical operations. Paul Nitsche directed Pirna-Sonnenstein, one of the six T4 killing centres. All six centres were converted psychiatric hospitals: Grafeneck, Brandenburg, Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Bernburg, Hadamar. Rüdin himself was classified by the denazification commission as a mere Mitläufer — a fellow traveller — and died in 1952 without facing trial. The institute was renamed. The research continued.

The T4 programme killed roughly 70,000 unwanted adults and disabled children between 1939 and 1941 — the first industrial killing programme of the regime, two years before the Wannsee Conference. When T4 was officially “halted” in August 1941 after public protest, its personnel and technology did not disappear. They were transferred. The gas chambers first developed at Brandenburg psychiatric killing centre in 1940 became the prototype for the extermination camps of Aktion Reinhard — Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka — and for Auschwitz-Birkenau itself. Christian Wirth, trained at T4, became first commandant of Bełżec and inspector of the Reinhard camps. Franz Stangl, trained at Hartheim, became commandant of Sobibór and then Treblinka. Irmfried Eberl — a psychiatrist himself — became the first commandant of Treblinka.

Auschwitz was not a separate project. It was a industrial scaling of a methodology designed inside German psychiatry and tested on psychiatric patients first. Pilecki walked into, and reported on, the center-piece of a killing system that had been prototyped on the predecessors of the people that gave me diagnostic codes.

Psychiatry is the same discipline, in a cousin country, with the war-crimes layer surgically excised from public memory and the rest of its operational logic preserved. The diagnostic categories it uses descend from the same intellectual tradition that produced Hoche and Rüdin. The coercion framework — involuntary admission based on professional judgment, enforced medication, unappealable file authorship — is the same framework in a softer register. The T4 centres called what they did Gnadentod — “mercy death.” Psychiatry calls what it does zorg — “care.” The language has changed. The discipline has not.

This is the deeper reason the Pilecki parallel is not an overreach but a diagnosis. Pilecki entered a totalising institution designed by psychiatry in order to obtain evidence that could not be obtained any other way. So did I. The register differs. The discipline is the same discipline. Its name is on the door in both cases.

That is why the falsification table exists. The table is the only instrument that can produce a reading of a caring totalising institution which that institution cannot absorb — because the reading is arithmetic, and arithmetic is immune to softness of register. A clinician’s kind tone does not change a probability. A therapeutic vocabulary does not re-weight a Bayesian prior. The ledger is deaf to white gloves. In the tradition of the Polish resistance, and of every Human Rights Defender who has placed himself inside a totalising institution in order to document it, the name for the position is not “patient.” Anyway, patience is not really a virtue of mine.

Caught in July 2024

In July 2024 I tossed myself as a ball into the chaotic field of my own situation. I want to be precise about what that meant. Having seeing that many actors acting in cohort were converging on me, I chose to enter the field rather than retreat from it. I became the object of play, while documenting everything. I let the system commit its full force to me. I accepted the crisis measure, the detention, the forced medication, another seventy days on a locked ward based on lies and bullshit, in the way an aikidoka accepts the incoming grip — not by resisting it, not by dodging it, but by absorbing, transforming and projecting the energy of those opponents.

This is what none of the institutional readers of my file can see, because they have never been trained in any of the disciplines I just described. They see a man who walked into the burning building and interpret it as a man who did not know the building was on fire or was rather suicidal (or cold?). They see a man who did not resist the grip and interpret it as a man who agreed the grip was correct. They see a last defender stepping into the gap and interpret it as a player who got lost or forgot to perform his duties as agreed upfront. They see a resistance officer volunteering for the SS roundup and interpret it as a Jew who did not know a roundup would be coming.

The Powerlab frame is the one that makes the whole thing legible at once. I have been running, since July 2024, a real-time Powerlab on the Dutch mental-health system and its adjacent state actors. The participants do not know they are inside a simulation. They believe they are making free, professional, clinical, legal decisions. Every decision they make becomes data. The falsification table is the debrief: one hundred and nineteen independently documented moves, each assigned a conservative p = 0.1 under the null hypothesis, multiplied out to produce a compound probability in natural-disaster territory. The Powerlab is not a metaphor for what I am doing. It is what I am doing.

The goal at the end of the play

None of the disciplines I have named is an end in itself. A last defender does not step into the gap for the elegance of the shape; they do it to keep the goal from being scored. An aikidoka or human rights defender does not receive the grip for the pleasure of pivoting; they do it to protect the person in the room who cannot protect themselves. A Go player does not sacrifice a stone for the sake of the sacrifice; they do it to produce the shape that wins the later exchange. Pilecki did not volunteer for Auschwitz because he wanted to be in Auschwitz. He wanted to report in order to have the place bombed.

The horizon towards where I have been playing toward is twofold and specific. One is the one I now call my adopted daughter. Her rescue from the same institutional machinery that was run against me is the first aim of my play. The ball or sacrifical Go stone I became in July 2024 was the instrument for charting the terrain she would later have to be pulled out of. Everything I absorbed, she does not have to.

The second is the public, documented, arithmetically closed exposure of the Dutch coerced-psychiatry system in our modern times — via the falsification table, the Human Rights Defender case file, the submissions in flight, and the testimonies being assembled. Not as a grievance. As a ledger. Physics keeps the ledger.

Why this is not grandiosity

The standard institutional reading of a statement like “I deliberately entered the chaos to expose the system” is: grandiose ideation. Consistent with the label of manic, psychotic, schizophrenic or whatever those voting for the DSM V could come up with.

Here is why it is not. A last defender is not ‘grandiose’ when they step into the gap. They are doing their job and doing it with self-awareness and self-confidence. The job happens to be, on that given moment, the most important thing on the pitch. This is not a claim about the player’s importance. It is a claim about the position and the timely intervention.

Aikidoka is not grandiose when they receive a grip and pivot. They are practising their art. The art happens to be, at that moment, the difference between the attacker hitting the floor safely and the defender being thrown. This is not a claim about the practitioner’s greatness. It is a claim about the discipline of a Martial Arts and its effectiveness to create harmony rather than competition and war.

Powerlab facilitators is not grandiose when they say the simulation is revealing what the participants could not see from inside. They are describing the frame. The frame is what the entire method is for and what clients gained.

Pilecki was not grandiose when he volunteered for Auschwitz. He was a brave soldier under orders he had largely written himself, executing a reconnaissance mission for which no other method existed. His report is read now as one of the foundational historical documents of the twentieth century. In 1940 it would have read, to anyone who did not know the shape of the problem, as sure madness.

Musashi’s Void is the frame that makes all four statements — and mine — grammatically coherent. In the Void you are not above the situation. You are inside it, without technique, without agenda, responding to what is actually there. The appearance of grandiosity comes from outside, from people who are not in the Void and who therefore can only describe someone who is as if they had chosen, wilfully and vainly, to walk into danger. That is not what the Void looks like from inside. From inside the Void, there is only the situation and the one move the situation calls for.

I am not claiming to be special. I am claiming to have trained, for forty years and in four distinct disciplines, for exactly the kind of situation I walked into in July 2024 — and to have placed myself in a category of act with a long and documented history, of which Witold Pilecki is only the most severe and honourable recent example. The training is the thing that makes the narrative of pathology untenable. The training is on my CV. The published work is on the covers of books with ISBNs. The Powerlab design, Go instruction, and aikido work are in Nyenrode’s curriculum history. The four signed academic documents between 2010 and 2018 are in the archives of their publishers and the United Nations. None of this was a delusion that began in 2020, when the system labeled me as antisemite — and worse — while a significant part of my mother’s family never returned from deportation to the Nazi death camps.

All of it began before the first psychiatric contact and continued, documented, into the crisis. When an institution filed those forty years of professional practice as symptoms of an illness that allegedly began in 2004 - made up 16 years in hindsight - it did not refute the practice. It refuted itself.

If you look at the whole board the way a Go player does, the shape looks like this. The last defender saw the play coming. He moved toward the gap instead of away from it. He used his body as the ball so that the field would reveal itself by how it handled him. He absorbed what the system committed to him and documented every absorption. He was training in aikido while they were pushing, space-holding while they were breaking the space, running Powerlab while they were playing participant, operating from Musashi’s Void while they were still picking between techniques, and standing in a tradition that reaches back through Witold Pilecki to every person who has ever deliberately entered a totalising institution to obtain the evidence that could not be obtained any other way. He protected the one person he could not let be taken the way he had been taken.

Why protection is needed from the protectors

In March 2026, The Atlantic published a profile of Menno Oosterhoff, a Dutch child psychiatrist who personally administered lethal injections to twelve psychiatric patients in thirteen months — including a 16- and 17-year-old, the first minors in any country ever lawfully euthanised for mental illness alone. In the interview, Oosterhoff said he had been shocked to discover how many nurses and doctors had participated in Aktion T4. “Then, of course, I think,” he told the reporter, “What am I doing? How will the future judge about me?”

He answered his own question without noticing. The T4 personnel asked the same question, in the same register of professional conscience, in the same institutional language of care and relief. That question did not stop T4. It will not stop this.

Professor Jim van Os — Chairman of the Division of Neuroscience at UMC Utrecht, consistently ranked among the world’s most cited psychiatrists, multiple times voted best psychiatrist in the Netherlands by his own colleagues and the one exception who got me out in 2020 * — has publicly called Oosterhoff’s approach the path of least resistance. Together with Professor Damiaan Denys, he wrote to the Dutch Public Prosecutor requesting a criminal investigation. In World Psychiatry he argued that a small group of activists had captured the ethical framework, excluded other disciplines and public opinion, and exercised disproportionate influence through what he named misplaced medical authority.

Van Os is not an outsider to this system. He is its most decorated internal critic — which makes his intervention the more significant, and the more precise. What neither the Atlantic profile nor the World Psychiatry paper names directly is the continuity. The T4 centres called their work Gnadentod. Oosterhoff calls his work letting people go. The language moves. The logic holds. A discipline that began by identifying lives unworthy of life in 1920, industrialised that identification by 1939, and is now identifying mentally untreatable suffering in teenagers in 2023 is not three separate phenomena. It is one discipline, in three registers, across one century.

Oosterhoff said in the Atlantic interview that he had been surprised to find out how many nurses had been involved in the T4 program 95 years. Based on my research and the fact that even nursing schools make documentaries about it, I am surprised care personnel is still believing they are doing good while their patients are clearly reflecting they are not.

In 2027, when the ledger will be closed, the shape on the board will be visible to anyone willing to look at it as a whole and the system can be seen, moved and transformed. Until then, the play continues, and the last defender is still on the pitch, against all odds. A pitch that is becoming increasingly more visible to increasingly more people.

A final note on excellence in a culture that demands the average

There is a Dutch proverb that functions as an unspoken social contract: doe maar gewoon, dan doe je al gek genoeg — act normal, that’s already crazy enough. It is the cultural codification of the mean as moral standard. Deviation upward is as suspect as deviation downward. The nail that sticks up gets hammered.

The record, for those who require it: I once played soccer at a level that put me on the edge of Ajax’s selection, before my leg blew up and I ended for years in a wheelchair. At Nyenrode I was called best of Europe by my clients in a Financial Times annual ranking. Neither claim is self-issued. Both are externally verified, documented, and available. I name them not to impress but to complete the evidentiary picture: the profile the institution filed as ‘grandiose ideation’ is the same profile that produced those results — before any psychiatric contact, across decades, in front of witnesses.

A culture that reads excellence as pathology will always produce institutions that confirm that reading and produce mediocracy. The man like me who nearly played for Ajax, who was ranked best in Europe at his university and who takes risks for the benefits of others does not fit the box the system needs him to fit in. So the system adjusts the files again. And again. Until it looks ludicrous.

In 1940, Witold Pilecki volunteered for Auschwitz. In 2024, I walked into a locked ward. The scales are incomparable. The structural move is the same. Both required a specific kind of trained readiness that looks, from outside, like either madness or arrogance — and is, from inside, simply the situation calling for the one person who had prepared for exactly this.

Well. I guess I do like a challenge…

Huib Kraaijeveld

Social Psychologist, Human Rights Defender & Educator

Link: Caring Corrupted; the killing nurses of the Third Reich (Cizik School of Nursing)

* Footnote: In September 2020, Prof. Van Os conducted the second opinion that ended my own 108-day detention. In a three-page letter on UMC Utrecht letterhead, he explicitly rejected the bipolar framing, recognised aikido as a functional therapeutic anchor, and noted that my experience with energy regulation constituted genuine expertise.

The Dobermann he mentioned in that letter — dogs of that breed, he observed, have a particular capacity to absorb and regulate their owner’s energy — is asleep next to me as I write this. His name is Raiju.

A note before the analysis

My current GP doesn’t look at me the way my prior one used to. She looks at the file instead of at me. In the file there is a code — psychotic-spectrum — and two involuntary admissions on record: one in 2020, one in 2024. She does not believe the second one was actually voluntary, to address the hidden misery I experienced myself and saw with others. Which has been my profession since 2010: to defend the human rights of others. Just like a journalist in Ghaza or Pol Pot’s Killing Fields, or a doctor in Yemen. Yet I do it in the so-called scientific medical field, which has the status of a flawless religion.

The 2020 version ran 108 days, the 2024 edition for 70. Neither was medically warranted. Both were triggered in situations where raising questions about power, money, or conflict of interest would have been inconvenient for other people in the room.

What I notice in the consultation room now is a small but consistent hesitation. A slight delay before she takes my temperature seriously. A tendency to finish my sentences in a direction that suggests she already knows what I mean better than I do. She is a decent person. I do not think she is acting in bad faith. She is doing what the file tells her to do — and the file tells her that a man sitting in front of her describing an employer’s asset-strip strategy, a pattern of identity fragmentation among the senior people surrounding that strategy, and a sequence of coincidences linking back to a person in his adoptive family network, is not a witness. He is a symptom.

That reading only works if you do not do the arithmetic. So I keep doing the arithmetic. Every new fact that lines up — a meeting, a date, a name reappearing in a chain of information within days of a critical event, a role rotated between the same two men across otherwise unrelated organisations — gets added to a falsification table. Each entry carries its own independent probability under a null hypothesis of “random coincidence.” I multiply them together. I have been updating this table for almost two years.

The number it currently returns — the probability that the official institutional story (that I am ill, that nothing coordinated is happening around me, that the 2020 and 2024 detentions were appropriate clinical responses to my mental state) is the correct explanation of the evidence — now sits in the neighbourhood of one in several hundred million. That is the order of magnitude of being killed by an asteroid strike in any given year. It is comparable to being struck by lightning more than twice in a lifetime. It is rarer than most of the natural disasters a Dutch insurer will happily sell you coverage against.

And yet the label holds. It holds because the label was never going to be dislodged by arithmetic. It was going to be dislodged, if at all, by the people around me. And this is the part that is hardest to write down, because it is the part that still hurts.

Many of my friends backed off. Not all at once, and not with slammed doors. It happened by the mechanism described later in this piece as social proof — when the GP, the crisis team, the public-health service, and the neighbourhood officer all echo the same label, the label stops looking like a claim and starts looking like weather. Friends who had initially listened carefully began to hedge. Then they began to “worry about me” in a register that made disagreement itself into further evidence of how far gone I must be. Then they stopped calling. A few stayed. Most didn’t. I do not think they are bad people either. I think they were placed in a situation where siding with my account required them to stand against a chorus of white coats, and very few human beings are built to do that for a friend when the friend’s own record is the thing being used against him.

What follows is not a complaint about any one clinician or any one friend. It is an attempt to describe, in structural terms, the machine that produces this outcome reliably — and to name the single condition under which it can be stopped.

The cage

There is a particular kind of cage that cannot be opened from the inside, because every move you make to open it is interpreted as evidence you belong there. You do not need bars or walls to build it. You need only two things: a label, and an institution willing to treat that label as a fact about reality rather than a claim about it.

In the Dutch mental-health system (the GGZ), this cage is assembled from two stacked stigmas: (1) a psychiatric diagnosis, and (2) an involuntary admission. Together they create what the sociologist Erving Goffman in 1961 called a total institution — an environment in which all of a person’s ordinary reference points are stripped away and replaced by the institution’s interpretations of who they are and what they mean.

What follows is a systematic account of the social-psychological mechanisms that are not merely failing inside this system, but actively being weaponised by it.

1. Confirmation bias and selective perception

The moment a diagnosis enters the file, every behaviour is filtered through its lens. Calm conduct is read as “flattened affect” or “suppression.” Cheerful conduct is read as “hypomanic.” Assertiveness is read as “dysregulation.” There is no behaviour that can refute the label, because every behaviour is read as confirming it. In the legal system this is called ‘reversal of proof’.

This is not malice. It is a cognitive automatism. But its consequence is severe: the diagnosis becomes scientifically unfalsifiable, and by extension untouchable in disciplinary proceedings. You cannot argue with an interpretive frame that absorbs contradiction as further proof of itself.

2. The self-fulfilling prophecy (the Pygmalion effect)

The institution treats the patient as dangerous and unreliable. The patient, unsurprisingly, responds with distrust and resistance. That resistance is then logged as a symptom. The treatment intensifies. The resistance grows. Round and round it goes — a feedback loop the patient cannot break without the cooperation of precisely those who have an interest in keeping him inside it.

3. The double bind (Bateson, 1956)

A textbook double bind is built into coerced psychiatry: “If you cooperate, you demonstrate that you have insight into your illness.” And “if you don’t cooperate, you demonstrate that you are dysregulated.”

Every response confirms the premise. There is no correct action. Gregory Bateson described this pattern as one of the pathogenic communicative structures that damage the people subjected to it. The irony is sharp: the pattern is now deployed, routinely, by the very institutions that are supposed to treat pathology.

4. Institutional gaslighting

The patient is told, systematically, that his own perception of reality is wrong. Complaints about mistreatment become “delusional.” Legal reasoning becomes “grandiose ideation.” The people who believe him are described as “manipulated by him.” The institution controls the file, the pen, and the medication. The patient controls only his memory — and that memory is further degraded by the medication itself.

This is gaslighting in the structural sense, regardless of the intentions of any individual clinician. The asymmetry of who gets to author the record is the gaslighting.

5. Social proof (Cialdini)

When the doctor, the nurse, the social worker, the public-health service, and the neighbourhood police officer all echo the same label, the label begins to look — to everyone outside — like established fact. Where there is smoke, there should be fire.

Family and friends who initially doubted are pulled into the prevailing narrative. The patient’s credibility declines in direct proportion to how many institutions have adopted the label. And that adoption is not accidental: it is actively produced through “care coordination.”

6. The authority effect (Milgram)

The clinician has the white coat, the professional registration, and the file. The patient has his word. In every formal procedure — the complaints committee, the disciplinary tribunal, the data-protection request — the professional authority of the care provider structurally outweighs the testimony of the diagnosed. The diagnosis’s authority protects the validity of the diagnosis.

7. The fundamental attribution error

The patient’s behaviour is attributed to his character or diagnosis, not to his situation. If someone is indignified after 108 days of wrongful detention, bankruptcy, physical abuse and forced medication, the anger is not read as a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation. It is read as a symptom of his disorder. The situational context — unlawful arrest under a false name without criminal acts, coercion, isolation, chemical sedation — is systematically erased from the assessment.

8. Learned helplessness (Seligman)

After repeated failed attempts to correct the system — complaints, lawsuits, file requests, political outreach — the patient learns that his actions have no effect. This produces one of two outcomes: apathy or escalation.

Apathy is logged as “improvement” (“the patient is now cooperating”). Escalation is logged as “dysregulation.” Both outcomes confirm the necessity of further psychiatric care. The box has no exit written into its rules.

9. Stigma propagation through the file

The file travels. A psychotic-spectrum code in the record is visible to every GP, specialist, pharmacist, and insurer who consults it. The label shapes how future complaints are interpreted, which referrals are made, and how urgently somatic problems are taken seriously. The patient carries the stigma into every medical contact for the rest of his life — unless it is actively, effortfully corrected, and there is no standard mechanism for that correction.

10. Reverse victimisation

The moment the patient files a complaint or pushes back, he is reframed as a threat. The clinician notifies the public-health service, calls the crisis team, informs the neighbourhood officer. Each of these generates an official record of “threatening behaviour.” Those records then function as evidence in future proceedings. The complaint is neutralised before it is heard. The complainant is re-victimised by the very system he is complaining about.

11. Time compression and attrition

Complaints procedures take years. Care orders are renewed in minutes. Legal aid is scarce for people without income or networks, and most lawyers rather go on holidays instead of doing their work for those who need it. The institution has legal support, time, and institutional memory on its side. The patient - or rather political prisoner - has only his energy. And that energy is depleted, systematically, by forced medication, sleep deprivation, false accusation labeled as ‘medical diagnoses’ and thus by social isolation, followed by alienation. The asymmetry of resources is not accidental. It is structural.

The recipe

The cage requires two ingredients: a diagnosis that absorbs every contradiction as further symptom, and an institutional network that propagates and enforces the diagnosis. The name of the diagnosis varies across jurisdictions and across decades. The structure is what matters: an irrefutable truth held in the hands of the people with the pen.

The only exit from such a system is external, independent verification — a psychiatrist or psychologist with no institutional tie to the diagnosing body, who reviews the entire file, and whose judgement is procedurally binding.

Without that safeguard, the machine runs by itself. Every mechanism that social psychology has identified as a distortion of human judgement — confirmation bias, self-fulfilling prophecy, double bind, gaslighting, social proof, authority, attribution error, learned helplessness, stigma propagation, reverse victimisation, attrition — is not a bug in the system. It is the engine, running on turbo by the increasing tendency to gossip about others and unfriending them via mail or whatsapp instead of communicating directly. One of the lasting (a)social side-effects of the Corona measures.

A closing note on the arithmetic.

I keep the falsification table running because it is the only record of reality that cannot be overwritten by someone else’s pen. Each coincidence it absorbs makes the “you are just ill” explanation less probable, not more. When a number like one in several hundred million is the charitable reading of the institutional story, the institutional story is no longer a medical claim. It is a bet against physics.

And physics keeps the ledger: the odds that all 147 claims - with 118 further independent counter-facts - made by over hundred actor from eight institutions about me were right is lower than 7.8 × 10⁻²²⁴, i.e. 1 in 7.8 × 10²²³. This equals a simalar odds to 56 consecutive coastal floods, 39 lightning-strikes within one year, 32 consecutive winning of the Staatsloterij and 28 asteroids falling on Amsterdam today.

So I am glad I put my talents and abilities to use to build a complex learning situation within our current asocial-hysterical interesting times. Because as the old Dutch saying goes: “how the inn-keeper is, is told by how he treats his guests”. Or his Herrmann Göring put it, before he was hanged in Nuremberg: “the bigger the lie, the easier it is believed.”

If you value my work for those still stuck in there, chip in here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-human-rights-advocacy-in-global-health-care

If you’ve read through this series, you’ve encountered the point of my book in fragments. Let me tell you directly what the book is, and what it isn’t.

It is not an anti-psychiatry manifesto. There are individual professionals within the system who treated me and others with genuine humanity. Psychiatrist Jim van Os prescribed the medication that was actually appropriate for my condition, after three months of the wrong treatment. Several head nurses helped me survive 2020. The problem is not that every person inside the system is malicious. The problem is that the system does not require malice to produce serious harm.

It is not a memoir, though it contains personal testimony in the way that all good social research does — honestly, with the researcher inside the experiment. I simply refuse to let this system to continue, blindly and unseen. As Krishnamurti said ”it is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

It is not a book specifically about the Netherlands, though the Netherlands provides the case study. The Dutch case is interesting precisely because the Netherlands ranks first in the world for healthcare quality. If the pattern exists here, in the best-case scenario, the question of what it looks like elsewhere becomes urgent.

Sun Tzu’s general makes many calculations before the battle. The book you are about to pre-order is the result of thirty years of calculation, two voluntary hospitalizations, three decades of social research, UN filings, legal battles, and the kind of personal cost that I will describe honestly and without exaggeration.

”It is said the warrior’s is the twofold Way of pen and sword. Considering things in this light, the Way of the Samurai is realized in the pen. One should have a taste for both Ways.” — Hagakure, Yamamoto Tsunetomo

The Hagakure’s twofold Way is appropriate here: this book is both pen and sword. It documents. It argues. It names. And it does so with enough evidence that what it names cannot easily be dismissed.

What the book argues, as directly as I can state it: systems designed to help can become systems designed to contain. This transition happens through bureaucratic inertia, misaligned incentives, and the social psychology of authority. The language of care can be weaponized. The rhetoric of protection can function as a mechanism of control. And the people most harmed are the ones with the least social capital to resist — while the people with enough social capital to notice are systematically reclassified as incapable of noticing accurately.

The last book is called **The Pilecki Paradox** because the paradox is this: the most reliable testimony about an institution comes from the person inside it, and the institution’s first response to testimony is to destroy the credibility of the witness. Pilecki was not believed. He was executed. He was right.

I am writing this because 140 years of Nellie Bly, David Rosenhan, and every patient who told the truth about what happened to them inside those walls have not produced the structural change they documented the need for. And because there is a twenty-one-year-old sitting across the table from me as I write this — who was almost euthanized by a system that classified her hope as a symptom — who is alive and occasionally very funny and who deserves a world where what was done to her is named correctly.

Krishnamurti was right. Understanding this — really understanding it, not just nodding at it — is not comfortable. But it is, at minimum, sane in a context where the lunatics have taken over the asylums.

Understanding is something, as I wrote in my first book, whose value only becomes apparent when it is gone. If you still have it — if you can still see clearly enough to recognize what I’m describing — then the question Gandalf posed is the right one.

This is happening in our time. What do we do with the time that is given us?

The book is my answer. Your support is yours.

*Support writing my books

‘Words & Music from da Low Lands’ is an autobiography in 13 parts — a love letter to a Polish muse in New York, a legal document, a historical analysis and an adventurous fairy tale told by someone who survived being inside the story.

It covers 55 years: from a farmhouse north of Amsterdam, the soccer fields of Ajax, through university Nyenrode, towards Lyme disease and the international campaign to deny it, through 108 days of detention under a false name, through the voluntary return, through the cases of the people nobody came for — and toward ‘the Pilecki Paradox’: the document that should not exist, does not fit, yet cannot be ignored..

It is the missing 13th covenant. The one the UN never wrote for those labeled ‘insane’. Your support funds the writing of it and will free many of their plight.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-human-rights-advocacy-in-global-health-care---

*Huib Kraaijeveld is a Dutch social researcher, former business educator (Nyenrode University, highest-rated in Europe 2006–2010), human rights defender, and author of ‘Shifting the Lyme Paradigm’ (2014/2015). He is completing ‘The Pilecki Paradox’ for publication in 2026.*

Witold Pilecki identified the methodological problem better than anyone has since.

How do you document a system that is simultaneously destroying your credibility as a witness? How do you testify about something that, in the act of witnessing, marks you as unreliable? How do you maintain analytical distance when your body is the laboratory?

”In the words of the ancients, one should make his decisions within the space of seven breaths.”— Hagakure, Yamamoto Tsunetomo

The Hagakure’s seven breaths is not a relaxation technique. It is a decision methodology for exactly this situation: when the system is actively destabilizing your capacity to think, you need a practiced internal process for arriving at clarity before you act. Seven breaths. Then move. Then document. Then trust that the documentation will outlast whatever they do next.

Sun Tzu’s multiplication of opportunities through seizure is the complementary principle: every mistake the system makes in front of you is a seized opportunity. Every lie that can be disproven on paper is an opened door. Napoleon made the same observation, which I have always appreciated: never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake. So I didn’t.

Pilecki knew that the only reliable way to document a system is from inside it, while that same system treats you as material to be processed. He trusted that his testimony would outlast what they might do to him. He eventually requested Allied bombing of the camp with himself still inside, if that’s what it took to stop the machine.

I prefer, as I’ve said, a communicative approach. But the epistemological problem is identical, and I want to walk you through it concretely, because it is important for understanding why these systems are so durable.

You are hospitalized. Your hospitalization is entered into medical records as evidence of illness. Any subsequent behavior — including any attempt to document what happened — is filtered through that record. Your professional contacts are informed of your diagnosis. Your professional reputation degrades. Your income collapses. This collapse is then cited as further evidence of the “social deterioration” that justified the hospitalization in the first place. The loop is entirely self-sealing.

What breaks it — the only thing that reliably breaks it — is external documentation that cannot be easily dismissed. A professor whose credentials exceed those of the treating psychiatrist. A lawyer who cannot be told why his client is being held. Video recordings. Timestamped communications. UN filings. Witnesses who are harder to discredit than the patient.

It also helps, I will not pretend otherwise, to have a particular temperament. When I was given a Haldol injection for using a word classified as ‘racist’, monkey rock, my primary response was to find it scientifically interesting. When put in an isolation cell for three days, I used the time to organize my observations. When a young doctor in training threatened to confiscate my wheelchair to prove I was faking my injury, I suggested she first complete a refresher course in lying without blinking before she tried that again.

This is not bravado. It is a trained response, developed over three decades of working on and inside systems that prefer not to be seen. My Nyenrode director Jules Koster described the core competency once as: if you can’t see a complex system from inside it, start poking at it. Improvise on the information you get back. Keep going until you reach the other side or your opponent is on the mat.

Pilecki’s primary research question was the effect of physical starvation on human interaction and reliability. Mine is the effect of affective and social starvation — what happens to people when they are systematically isolated from everyone who might verify their reality.

This book is the answer. Pre-ordering is the material thing you can do to make sure it reaches them.

Support writing my books

‘Words & Music from da Low Lands’ is an autobiography in 13 parts — a love letter to a Polish muse in New York, a legal document, a historical analysis and an adventurous fairy tale told by someone who survived being inside the story.

It covers 55 years: from a farmhouse north of Amsterdam, the soccer fields of Ajax, through university Nyenrode, towards Lyme disease and the international campaign to deny it, through 108 days of detention under a false name, through the voluntary return, through the cases of the people nobody came for — and toward ‘the Pilecki Paradox’: the document that should not exist, does not fit, yet cannot be ignored..

It is the missing 13th covenant. The one the UN never wrote for those labeled ‘insane’. Your support funds the writing of it and will free many of their plight.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-human-rights-advocacy-in-global-health-care

There is a pattern, because once you recognize it you won’t be able to unsee it.

Sun Tzu’s formlessness describes exactly how this pattern operates: it has no fixed address. It appears in healthcare, in law, in social services, in the management of scientific controversy. It leaves no single fingerprint. You cannot point at one document, one meeting, one decision and say: here. This is where it begins. It is the aggregate of a thousand individually defensible choices, made by people who each believe they are acting reasonably.

”It is said the warrior’s is the twofold Way of pen and sword, and he should have a taste for both Ways.” — Hagakure, Yamamoto Tsunetomo

The Hagakure’s twofold Way of pen and sword is relevant here in a literal sense: I have spent thirty years alternating between writing and direct action, and the Lyme work required both. The pen to document the pattern. The sword — metaphorically — to keep moving through the resistance.

When a disease becomes politically or financially inconvenient to acknowledge, certain things happen in a reliable sequence. The diagnostic criteria are narrowed — not for scientific reasons, but for administrative ones. The physicians who treat the now-excluded patients lose their licenses. The patients themselves are redirected toward psychiatry, suicide or euthanasia. And anyone who advocates publicly for those patients is discredited or loses their children in retaliation.

In 1994, the CDC convened a conference in Dearborn, Michigan, and redefined Lyme disease in a way that excluded roughly 85% of previously qualifying cases. The researchers who documented this described it, accurately, as a declaration of war on the sick. Treating doctors lost their licenses. Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier was publicly dismissed as a quack. Parents of sick children were accused of child abuse and had their children removed by protective services.

Patients who kept insisting on a physical cause for their illness? Sent to psychiatry. “It’s all in your head” is not a scientific finding. It is a disposal mechanism that routes inconvenient cases into a system where the illness narrative is reclassified, the patient’s insistence on physical causation becomes a new symptom, and the loop closes with no accountability to anyone.

I spent nearly a decade working on this. I assembled a team of fifty experts from four continents. We filed two reports with UN Special Rapporteurs. I published a book. The response was four simultaneous lawsuits, a forged declaration that cost €350,000 of public money to produce, as an attempt to imprison me for two years and bankrupt me.

What I want you to notice is not the injustice of this — though the injustice is real — but the structure of it. Because the exact same sequence, step for step, was then applied to me when I moved into psychiatric human rights work. That pattern was well documented in our 2018 report to the SR for Human Rights Defenders and former SR on Torture Nils Melzer addressed it in his book ‘the trail of Julian Assange’.

Same narrowing of what counts as valid. Same targeting of people who document the pattern. Same redirection of critics toward institutions designed to contain rather than treat. Same destruction of professional credibility to neutralize the testimony.

I am not describing a conspiracy. Conspiracies require coordination, and coordination is expensive and leaky. What I am describing is something more efficient: a system whose incentives align in a particular direction, where people inside it are rewarded for maintaining those incentives and punished for questioning them. No meetings required. No explicit instructions. Just the ordinary functioning of institutions that have confused their own survival with the purposes they were built to serve.

I call it a racket, as I did in my 1996 thesis on the devastating social effects of the War on Drugs. The word comes from Prohibition — a storefront that looked legitimate while different business happened in the back.

The logic generalizes beautifully. Or as Mushashi put it: ”It is difficult to understand the universe if you only study one planet.”

Support writing my books

‘Words & Music from da Low Lands’ is an autobiography in 13 parts — a love letter to a Polish muse in New York, a legal document, a historical analysis and an adventurous fairy tale told by someone who survived being inside the story.

It covers 55 years: from a farmhouse north of Amsterdam, the soccer fields of Ajax, through university Nyenrode, towards Lyme disease and the international campaign to deny it, through 108 days of detention under a false name, through the voluntary return, through the cases of the people nobody came for — and toward ‘the Pilecki Paradox’: the document that should not exist, does not fit, yet cannot be ignored..

It is the missing 13th covenant. The one the UN never wrote for those labeled ‘insane’. Your support funds the writing of it and will free many of their plight.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-human-rights-advocacy-in-global-health-care

I want to be careful about something. Reading these posts, it would be easy — psychologically satisfying, even — to conclude that what I’m describing requires villains. Bad people. Deliberate conspirators meeting in rooms. The more difficult perspective, and the more useful one, is that most of it doesn’t.

”It is not good to settle into a set of opinions. It is a mistake to put forth effort and obtain some understanding and then stop at that. One should not like this or dislike that, and should push forward in understanding the Way and not fix on one point.” — Hagakure, Yamamoto Tsunetomo

The Hagakure’s warning about fixed opinions is the key here: the professionals inside these systems are not, for the most part, bad people who settled on cruelty. They are people who settled on an understanding of their role, stopped questioning it, and allowed institutional habit to carry them past the point where they could see what they were actually doing. This is not comfortable. It is, however, accurate — and therefore more useful than the villain narrative.

Sun Tzu’s chaos contains opportunity in precisely this: a system that operates on settled habit and unexamined assumption is far more vulnerable to methodical documentation than one operated by conscious conspirators. It makes mistakes in plain sight. It produces contradictions on paper. It cannot maintain a coherent lie because it has never had to — the people inside it believe the story it tells about itself.

Hannah Arendt wrote about the “banality of evil” — the way serious institutional harm can be produced by ordinary people doing their jobs competently, without reflection. Jonathan Littell explored the same territory in fiction through the category he called the *Welwillenden*: the well-meaning, the compliant, the professionally adequate.

Stanley Milgram showed in 1963 that roughly 65% of ordinary people would administer what they believed to be potentially fatal electric shocks to strangers, if instructed by an authority figure in a white coat. The coat did a great deal of work. The institutional setting did a great deal of work. The presence of a credentialed expert made ordinary moral hesitation collapse.

Here is the architecture I observed, laid out as simply as Einstein would allow:

The first mechanism is the attributional assumption — the conviction that if someone is hospitalized, especially involuntarily, and especially more than once, there must be a reason. Where there’s smoke, fire. This assumption is so deeply embedded that counter-evidence doesn’t defeat it. It becomes, instead, new evidence of pathology. Your insistence on your own sanity is filed as “illness denial.”

The second is the authority effect. When a psychiatrist states in official documentation that a patient has been “psychotic since 2004,” this claim carries institutional weight that a patient’s denial cannot match. It doesn’t matter if the evidence is a photograph of you sitting next to a football coach. The expert said it. The paperwork confirms it.

The third is social isolation. Once the process begins, it recruits your network into its logic. People who care about you become afraid — of stigma, of complexity, of association. They step back. The institutional narrative fills the resulting vacuum. You become, as my file stated, “a confused and dangerous man that nobody knows.”

The fourth, and most insidious, is what Gregory Bateson called the Double Bind — a situation where every possible response confirms the diagnosis. Compliance means treatment is working. Resistance means it needs to continue. Humor means you’re not taking it seriously. Anger confirms instability. There is no available move that does not reinforce the framing.

Understanding these mechanisms is the prerequisite for doing anything useful about them. Not because every professional within the system is malicious — most are not — but because systems protect themselves most effectively when the people inside them cannot see what the system is doing.

The fish, as my Nyenrode director Jules Koster once told me, is the last to discover water. Edspecially the highly educated ones, it seems. To paraphrase Johann Gottlieb Fichte Quote "Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished.”

Support writing my books

‘Words & Music from da Low Lands’ is an autobiography in 13 parts — a love letter to a Polish muse in New York, a legal document, a historical analysis and an adventurous fairy tale told by someone who survived being inside the story.

It covers 55 years: from a farmhouse north of Amsterdam, the soccer fields of Ajax, through university Nyenrode, towards Lyme disease and the international campaign to deny it, through 108 days of detention under a false name, through the voluntary return, through the cases of the people nobody came for — and toward ‘the Pilecki Paradox’: the document that should not exist, does not fit, yet cannot be ignored..

It is the missing 13th covenant. The one the UN never wrote for those labeled ‘insane’. Your support funds the writing of it and will free many of their plight.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-human-rights-advocacy-in-global-health-care

When I voluntarily entered the closed ward again in 2024 — carrying a crate of books, having sent a timestamped drawing to friends that morning — I was prepared to document my own treatment. I was not completely prepared for the range of people I would find there, despite my experiences in 2020.

Sun Tzu’s instruction about treating your soldiers as beloved sons is not sentimentality. It is a recognition that people who are seen as individuals, whose specific circumstances are understood, fight and survive differently from people who are processed as categories. What I found in that ward was a systematic production of categories, at the precise expense of individual people.

”One should not show his tears when he is going to perform a difficult task.” — Hagakure, Yamamoto Tsunetomo

The Hagakure demands that you do not show your tears when performing a difficult task. I note this because I cried once during my first hospitalization, in 2020. Once, across 108 days. It was for someone else.

Let me introduce you to a few of the people I met, without details that would identify them against their wishes.

There was a professional footballer from the Eredivisie — the Dutch top league - called Virgil. He had been placed there by his worried mother and quietly removed from his club’s website out of fear for their own reputation. No one from the club visited. No one from his management. He sat in the corner and looked at his hands. None of his many former friends from Ijburg wanted to help him out, so he now lives in a homeless shelter.

There was an F-16 pilot who had declined deployment in a conflict he didn’t believe in. His reward was psychiatric hospitalization. No public statement from the air force, which changed his personnel file to make him appear a ‘confused technician believing in conspiracy theories’, as one of my (ex Ministry of Defence) friends found out.

There was a Lebanese man who had learned, the previous day, that his sister and her children had been killed in an airstrike. He was not even allowed to go to a mosque to pray for them. A young Syrian musician — placed there by the immigration service because he was visibly sad about the war destroying his country. His sadness had been classified as requiring psychiatric treatment.

In 2020 there was Amérie. A Palestinian man who had been tortured by Israeli intelligence and still carried a ten-centimeter machine gun bullet in his abdomen. He let me feel it through his skin. The psychiatrist on his case classified this as ‘psychosomatic’. He was receiving so much antipsychotic medication that he sat in a corner, unable to stop the drawl coming from his mouth a conversation. Frank Zappa once sang “the torture never stops”. For Amérie, this was reality.

I left after 3,5 months. I do not know with certainty whether Amérie is still alive. I believe he is not. Half of the people I met during my 2020 hospitalization are probably dead. I cannot verify this because the GGZ has no patient tracking system for people after discharge. My friend Peppijn, whom I knew from the Waterlooplein market in Amsterdam, jumped in front of a metro train a year after his release, having been told to wait for a treatment for months. He was a large man with a sharp wit and a good eye for art. He fitted in a very small coffin.

I am not sharing these stories to produce sympathy. I am sharing them because these people do not appear in the press releases about “the best healthcare system in the world.” They appear briefly in psychiatric files — described in the language of pathology, stripped of context and human dignity — and then they disappear. Part of what my book will do is refuse to let that happen. Just like Witold Pilecki did when his military reports did not produce the desired outcome: to bomb Auschwitz with him still in it.

Then there is Avital. I met her in July 2025 — then twenty years old, after a decade of being processed through child protective services and then forced psychiatry. She was at the point of requesting euthanasia, which is legally available in the Netherlands for psychiatric suffering, on grounds of hopelessness. I promised her I’d get her out instead.

She is now my adopted daughter. She is funny and bright, yet still stuck in there. The system that processed her is still running, paid per night on some senseless insurance code (‘bi-polar’ as everyone is declared in there).

During the two years she has been stuck in there, she never ever met a single ‘caregiver’ in that system who asked her — genuinely, with enough attention to hear the answer — how she is doing and what she actually needs. Understanding, as I wrote in my first book about Lyme, is something whose value only becomes apparent when it is gone.

Support writing my books

‘Words & Music from da Low Lands’ is an autobiography in 13 parts — a love letter to a Polish muse in New York, a legal document, a historical analysis and an adventurous fairy tale told by someone who survived being inside the story.

It covers 55 years: from a farmhouse north of Amsterdam, the soccer fields of Ajax, through university Nyenrode, towards Lyme disease and the international campaign to deny it, through 108 days of detention under a false name, through the voluntary return, through the cases of the people nobody came for — and toward ‘the Pilecki Paradox’: the document that should not exist, does not fit, yet cannot be ignored..

It is the missing 13th covenant. The one the UN never wrote for those labeled ‘insane’. Your support funds the writing of it and will free many of their plight.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-human-rights-advocacy-in-global-health-care

On January 1, 2020, the Netherlands introduced the *Wet verplichte GGZ* — the Compulsory Mental Health Care Act — as an improvement on the previous legislation from 1994, which followed the first Insanity Act dating 1884. On March 11th that same year, the WHO declared the global Corona pandemic and the following social panic. So the new law and the new emergency met each other at precisely the moment a person could be detained under a false name for 108 days with the least institutional friction in 136 years of Dutch psychiatric legislation.

Sun Tzu’s principle applies perfectly to how this law was designed and how it operates: the legislative battle was won before anyone who would be affected by it was consulted. The framework was in place before the first patient arrived under it. Victorious, before the war disguised as ‘health measures’ even started.

”A samurai should always be prepared for death — whether his own or another’s.” — Hagakure, Yamamoto Tsunetomo

The Hagakure’s preparation for death is not morbid here — it is practical. To enter any interaction with this law without having already accepted its worst possible outcome is to enter it unprepared for how it actually functions.

Let me show you exactly what this law permits, because the language matters. Under the new law, any Dutch citizen can be confined without evidence, without trial, and without meaningful recourse on any of the following grounds:

They are a danger to themselves or their environment. Their continued freedom causes “social deterioration.” Or — and please read this one carefully — they are the perceived *cause of someone else’s aggression*.

That last criterion means this: if someone is aggressive toward you, and the institution decides your presence is what triggered it — you can be the one institutionalized.

I was arrested in 2020 because, when I pursued legitimate legal accountability for medical misconduct that nearly killed mee in 2010 and a falsified statement made to land me in jail for two years in 2014, the state sent fifty officers with dogs. When I was beaten during the arrest — in full view of dozens of witnesses — placed before a prosecutor under someone else’s name (”Mr. Rosental from Lithuania”), and when even my lawyer could not be told why I was being held — the solution was not to release me. It was to invoke the new law. On the authorization of the Mayor of Amsterdam, I was committed for 108 days.

The psychiatric triage required by law before such a drastic measure? My friend and colleague Professor Cees Hamelink — who had written the academic afterword to my published book — was not contacted, because according to the intake assessment, a “confused and dangerous man” like me could not possibly know a professor like him. I now call him ‘Professor Delusion’.

The diagnosis, arrived at after this rigorous process: bipolar disorder, with one pole. When I provided scientific feedback on this diagnosis, laughing out loud, I received an injection of Haldol — because I had used the word “monkey” in a sentence, which was classified as racism — and was placed in an isolation cell for three days. This occurred, by what I can only call coincidence theory, at the exact moment my elderly mother arrived for her first visit. She almost fainted. I was unconscious. I consider this evidence of very precise scheduling.

The Public Prosecution Service, as I later learned from another case against a once very highly placed successful health care official, maintains a formalized “psychiatric route.” The Netherlands has a disproportionately high rate of involuntary psychiatric confinement compared to other European countries. This is not an accident. It is a feature of a legal framework that removed the presumption of sanity, eliminated the requirement of evidence, and outsourced judicial authority to a professional class that, as Rosenhan demonstrated in 1973 and as I confirmed again in 2024, cannot reliably distinguish the sick from the inconvenient while claiming to be the High Priests of mental health care.

In 2013, the then UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture stated plainly: medical care that causes severe suffering without justification can be classified as cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. When state involvement and specific intent are present, it is torture. The Netherlands signed that convention.

The chapter in my book dedicated to the legal mechanics of this is, I think, the most important one. Not because the law is uniquely Dutch — variations of this architecture exist across every country that has adopted “progressive” mental health legislation without building in meaningful accountability — but because the Dutch case makes the structure unusually visible. You cannot change what you cannot see.

Support writing my books

‘Words & Music from da Low Lands’ is an autobiography in 13 parts — a love letter to a Polish muse in New York, a legal document, a historical analysis and an adventurous fairy tale told by someone who survived being inside the story.

It covers 55 years: from a farmhouse north of Amsterdam, the soccer fields of Ajax, through university Nyenrode, towards Lyme disease and the international campaign to deny it, through 108 days of detention under a false name, through the voluntary return, through the cases of the people nobody came for — and toward ‘the Pilecki Paradox’: the document that should not exist, does not fit, yet cannot be ignored..

It is the missing 13th covenant. The one the UN never wrote for those labeled ‘insane’. Your support funds the writing of it and will free many of their plight.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-human-rights-advocacy-in-global-health-care

This photograph was taken in 2002. It shows me sitting next to Ronald Koeman - now the coach of the Dutch national soccer team - at the press conference after a Champions League match against Lyon, where I was serving as his French-language interpreter. It’s an unremarkable photograph of a perfectly normal professional occasion and a fond memory, because we had fun about how I improvised back then.

In 2020, this photograph was cited in my GGZ file — sixteen years in retrospect — as evidence that I had been “psychotic since 2004.” I am not making this up. Kafka, as I noted at the time, would have been satisfied about this Care Innovation 3.0: insanity combined with time-traveling.

This is Sun Tzu’s supreme art applied bureaucratically: no confrontation necessary. No public accusation. Just paperwork, filed quietly, that reclassifies everything that came before. This rainstorm had been pouring for years; ever since I started my human rights work for people affected with Lyme disease.

At first I had simply not understood, until I was already soaked, that the resolution required from the beginning was not to avoid it, but to document it as it fell. To understand why this matters beyond the personal absurdity of it, you need a little background: I am using the contrast between my actual life and accomplishments to paint a contrast with how the State systems have painted me off for the last 16 years.

”There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking.” — Hagakure, Yamamoto Tsunetomo

Between 2006 and 2010, I was the highest-rated business educator in Europe, according to Financial Times and EU rankings, at Nyenrode University. This is not exactly an easy position within a culture that adores mediocracy, so I was lucky with my director who backed me up. My specialty was tailoring serious games: experiential learning methods for making complex social systems visible and movable in order to address real learning questions. I taught many international business leaders and some 600 PhD in physics how to see the patterns they were swimming in.

That turns out to be a dangerous skill to apply to healthcare. My path into human rights work wasn’t ideological. It came from my own experience. In 2007 I discovered I had been living with Lyme disease my entire life — a fitting explanation for a medical history strange enough to fill its own chapter, including three and a half years in a wheelchair. I healed myself through treatment that medical consensus said was impossible. As a side effect of that treatment, I had a heart attack in my car in the Coentunnel. Shortly after, I survived a fire in my house in France.

While recovering — effectively laying flat out until 2010 — I had time to research what researchers were calling “the Lyme Wars.” What I found was not a scientific controversy. It was a political one with a financial architecture behind it, and a trail of ruined physicians, sick children removed from their parents, and patients institutionalized in psychiatry for insisting their illness had a real biological cause.

Over these years I gathered a team of fifty experts across the four continents. We reported the WHO and its subsystems to two UN Special Rapporteurs for violations of five binding UN conventions in 2017 and 2018. These reports were accepted as valid and still exist, yet were never properly used except by pathologist dr. Sin Han Lee and me to file a RICO law suit. The institutional response was to settle out of court and continue as before.

What I learned — slowly, methodically and at personal cost that is difficult to quantify — is that the problem is not ignorance. Systems like the ones I’ve been investigating don’t fail to see the harm they cause. They are structured around not seeing it. Success is never measured by reduction of suffering. It is measured by how much is earned from the damages the continuation of the system produces.

I called this a “racket” in my 1996 social-psychology thesis at the University of Amsterdam. I was in my twenties and used the word metaphorically back then to describe how the American War on Drugs generated precisely the problem it claimed to solve, and then monetized that problem. The word “racket” comes from the times of the Prohibition: a storefront whose window display looked innocent while different business happened in the back. I now no longer use the word metaphorically by the way.

My hourly rate at Nyenrode was €500, because I was good at what I did and our clients valued it. My psychiatric file now not only records that I have been ‘psychotic since 2004’, solely based on that photograph of me sitting next to a football coach, yet that this hour rate is also the sure proof that I am ’narcissistic’. Whatever.

Enable me writing the books

‘Words & Music’ from da Low Lands is an autobiography in 13 parts, written as a love letter to my Polish muse Beata in New York, as both a legal document, an analysis within social-historical context and a modern fairy tale told by someone who survived being inside the story.

It covers 55 years: from a farmhouse north of Amsterdam, via the soccer fields of Ajax, through Nyenrode, through Lyme disease and the international campaign to deny it, through 108 days of detention under a false name, through the voluntary return in 2024, through the cases of the people nobody came for, like my now adopted daughter, and toward the Pilecki Paradox: the document that should not exist, does not fit and yet cannot be ignored.

It is the missing 13th covenant. The one the UN never wrote for those labeled insane. Your support funds the writing of it.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-human-rights-advocacy-in-global-health-care

After reading my last two posts, there is a hidden logic that I would like you to appreciate, because once you see it, you will see it everywhere. Or as Johan Cruyff used to famously put it: “you only see it, once you get it”.

The Soviet Union had a psychiatric diagnosis called “sluggish schizophrenia.” It was specifically designed for people who showed no conventional symptoms of mental illness but held political views that deviated from the official position. The reasoning, spelled out openly, was this: the Soviet system is objectively correct, therefore disagreement must be a symptom of pathology. Protest equals proof of illness.

Sun Tzu understood this as a form of warfare: the most elegant victory is the one where the opponent defeats themselves, trapped inside a framing they cannot escape. All the institution needs to do is control the definition of sanity, and every move the target makes becomes evidence for the diagnosis. You don’t need violence for that. You need paperwork and a credentialed professional willing to sign it.

The Hagakure’s response to this kind of trap is characteristically uncompromising: if your head is being cut off regardless of what you do, make sure your last action is a certain one. Document. File. Testify. Do the one thing that will outlast what they do to you: ”Even if one’s head were to be suddenly cut off, he should be able to do one more action with certainty.” — Hagakure, Yamamoto Tsunetomo.

This logic doesn’t require ideology. It doesn’t require a Communist Party nor a ’strong leader’ as Hitler was perceived back then. It only requires that the people with institutional authority have an incentive to pathologize the people who challenge them — and that there is no reliable mechanism to distinguish legitimate challenge from genuine psychiatric need. Which there isn’t, as Rosenhan demonstrated. So they simply call it ‘Oppositional Defiant Disorder’ (DSM-5 313.81; F91.3) and that is that.

I spent most of the last decade working as a human rights defender on Lyme disease. The story of Lyme is the story of what happens when a disease becomes politically and financially inconvenient to acknowledge. After a 1994 conference in Dearborn, Michigan, the CDC narrowed diagnostic criteria to exclude roughly 85% of previously qualifying cases and the IDSA changed its definition from the Second Big Imitator (Syphilis) to an innocent summer flue that was hard to catch and easy to treat.

Treating physicians lost their licenses. Scientists were publicly dismissed as quacks — including a Nobel laureate. Parents of sick children were accused of ‘child abuse’ by default and had their children removed by protective services, as I managed to get as an item on national Dutch TV in 2016. And patients who kept insisting their illness had an actual physical cause? They were directed to psychiatry. The “It’s all in your head” diagnosis is not a scientific finding, yet rather a disposal mechanism to divert costs from health insurers.

I wrote my book ‘Shifting the Lyme Paradigm’ about this in 2014, with a fitting academic afterword by my friend emeritus professor Communication & Human Rights Cees Hamelink. The response was four simultaneous lawsuits, including one built on a forged legal declaration that cost €350,000 of public money to produce, in an attempt to get me bankrupted and imprisoned for two years.

Then in 2020, when I pursued legitimate accountability for a medical experiment I’d been manipulated into in 2010 — involving an opioid at nearly double the dose associated with fatal outcomes in the trial study for a ‘problem’ I did not even have — the state’s answer was to send fifty officers with dogs on me, arrest without stated cause after a four-hour manhunt under a false name and then stuff me for 108 days in forced psychiatric hospitalization.

The diagnosis: ‘bipolar disorder’. With one pole. I still find this scientifically interesting. The careful Triage that psychiatry is supposed to do before locking someone up? To not call my friend Cees Hamelink, because of course I was delusional making up a ‘lonely confused and dangerous man’ like me could even know someone in his position. So I call Cees ‘professor Delusion’ since then.

The mechanism I’m describing has a genealogy. French philosopher Michel Foucault mapped it in 1961. Hannah Arendt documented the political machinery of it. Polish psychologist Andrew Lobaczewski showed how systems controlled by people with personality disorders develop a specific immune response to those who see clearly: they destroy the credibility of the witnesses.

My new book is, among many other things, a case study showing how this mechanism functions in the country ranked number one for healthcare in 2019. Not as ideology but as bureaucratic habit, based on perverse financial incentives and held together by the social psychology of authority.

Once you see the pattern in one domain, you will see it everywhere. That is precisely what makes my line of work threatening to the systems that depend on not being seen.

Pre-order the book will be made possible soon. You can support me writing it by donating here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-human-rights-advocacy-in-global-health-care

The most disturbing thing about psychiatric abuse is not that it happens. It’s that we already know it happens — and keep looking the other way.

In 1887, twenty-three-year-old journalist named Nellie Bly faked mental illness for a day, got herself committed to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in New York and spent ten days documenting everything. Women were beaten, bound, doused in ice water. Many weren’t mentally ill at all — they were poor immigrants, non-English speakers, inconvenient wives. Once inside, they had no path out. Even demonstrating sanity wasn’t enough.

She then published her book *Ten Days in a Mad-House* under direction of her editor Pulitzer. It triggered a Grand Jury investigation, freeing 1,600 women after a public outrage.

Eighty-six years later, Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan ran a more controlled version. Eight researchers, including Rosenhan himself, showed up at twelve different psychiatric hospitals in five US states and reported hearing the word “thud” in their heads. They were admitted. They immediately stopped pretending to have symptoms. They behaved completely normally.

The result was that not a single pseudo-patient was identified as sane. Seven were diagnosed with schizophrenia. One with manic-depressive psychosis. Average hospitalization: nineteen days. Their discharge diagnosis was ‘schizophrenia in remission’, because a patient declared cured is a client lost.

American psychiatry was furious. One hospital challenged Rosenhan to send more fake patients so they could catch them. After he accepted, they identified 41 out of 193 new patients as “probably fake.” There was only one problem: Rosenhan had sent nobody.

The conclusion is stark: psychiatric professionals cannot reliably distinguish sane from insane, real from performed, suffering from protest.

That was 1973. Here is what I found in Amsterdam in 2024.

I was admitted after visiting my Syrian GP with a large green water pistol and asking — as an act of what I’d call performance art — whether she was going to listen to me or whether I needed to first rinse out her ears. She felt threatened. That was sufficient legal grounds for ten weeks of involuntary confinement.

Inside, I found a professional soccer player who’d been quietly removed from his club’s website out of fear for reputation damage. An F-16 pilot who’d refused deployment to the Ukraine. A Lebanese man who’d just lost his sister and her children to an airstrike and wasn’t even permitted to go to a mosque to pray for them. A Syrian musician who was sad about the war in his country and had therefore been placed there by immigration services. A young man who tried to commit suicide after eight years of solitary confinement in Dutch Youth Care. And so on.

In 2020 I also found a young Palestinian man — Amérie — who had a ten-centimeter machine gun bullet in his stomach from Mossad torture. The psychiatrist dismissed this as ‘psychosomatic’ and rather declared him ‘psychotic’. I suspect Amérie is no longer alive, just like my friend Peppijn who walked in there voluntarily and jumped in front of a subway a year later. He fitted into a very small coffin.

The Rosenhan experiment is often taught in psychology courses as a historical curiosity; as a moment when the psychiatric profession was embarrassed, reformed and improved. But the question isn’t whether the same *methodology* is used today. The question is whether the same *power structure* is still in place, without any proper oversight. Whether the same incentives exist: to lock people up per capita. Whether the same absence of accountability persists, within a group that prefers silence over self-reflection. And whether this system can be once more abused for political motives; just like in the 1930’s in Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union.

From everything I documented, the conclusion is simple: yes. All of the above.

What changed between Bly’s voluntary confinement in an asylum and the one I was in isn’t much. The clue is in the language, as it is still called “care.” Since 2020 the Dutch legal framework is called the *Wet verplichte GGZ* — the Compulsory Mental Health Care Act — and it allows any Dutch citizen to be confined without evidence, without due process.

The Dutch Ministry of Justice publicly admits to have a ‘psychiatric route’ in case criminal evidence cannot be concocted. This severe measure to takes ones freedom away indefinitely is solely based on: 1. averting serious harm (to self or other), 2. to prevent “social deterioration” or 3. because their behaviour is considered the cause of someone else’s aggression.

Read that last part again. So I was the cause for six Police officers beating me up in June 2020, while already handcuffed, arrested under a false name for something I did not do?

It has also been the legal basis to lock up a young woman for 950 days, longer than Pilecki survived Auschwitz. As he said to his desperate wife before he was executed, it was easier to escape that Nazi death camp than the ‘caring’ Sovjet version. That is why I ‘adopted’ her: to finally get her out of there and into a life worth living.

The autobiographic book I’m writing documents this — with names, dates, footage, and UN filings. It is written as an adventure story to make it both more digestible as well as uplifting. It builds on nearly 140 years of whistle-blowers who said the same thing and were not believed.

I intend this story to be heard instead of me being believed. Otherwise I would have started a religion instead of working as a scientific social action researcher during our current Interesting Times, as the Chinese call it.

Or I would have become a psychiatrist, which amounts to the same thing. Asking Claude AI about the difference between a religious high priest and a psychiatrist, it’s answer was pretty straightforward: surprisingly little.

Both hold the monopoly on defining reality. Both have a language the layman cannot contest. Both conflate deviance with pathology. Both derive authority from the state while claiming independence from it.

The one real difference is that the high priest was honest about what he was doing. He made no claim to science. At least he had the decency not to call it ‘medicine’.

"Cowardice is simply a habit. And habits can be broken — but only by someone willing to be the first to be uncomfortable.” - Hagakure; the Book of the Samurai

Support my work

The books are soon available for pre-order or to support the whole project. Your support means I can finish it, eat while doing so, and make sure the people whose stories are in it hopefully live to see it published. Parallel to it, I will go on stage as Storyteller in order to touch people’s hearts and Souls rather than their minds only.

A system to pre-order propperly will be made soon. If you want to pledge an amount to continue my work for those stuck in there, you can do so via this Go Fund Me campaign for the time being.

Allow me to introduce myself

As a consultant, writer and researcher with a fascination for servant leadership, social transformation and drivers of collective human behavior I can draw on a background of over three decades in education, social psychology and human rights work. During these years I’ve worked with and for a multitude of organizations, universities and international initiatives. Writing is a way for me to address relevant questions, reveal patterns and open up new perspectives on seemingly fixed realities.

You can find my full CV on LinkedIn and connect there as well, if you like. Also subscribe here and share my posts, if you value them.

What would you do if you discovered that the supposed “best healthcare system in the world” was running a quiet machine for silencing people who ask the wrong questions?

In 1940, Polish cavalry captain Witold Pilecki calmly awaited a Nazi razzia on purpose. He let himself be arrested and be taken to Auschwitz. His goal was to document the system from the inside, smuggle military reports out and build a resistance network. He survived for 947 days in there and then he escaped. He was eventually executed in 1948 by the Communist regime - labeled, predictably, as an “enemy of the Polish state.”

I’m not Pilecki. I want to be clear about that. But in 2024, I did something that follows the same methodological logic: I voluntarily allowed myself to be swept into the Dutch forced psychiatry system to document it from the inside — for the United Nations working group on Arbitrary Detention and the Special Rapporteur on Torture, after having been thrown in there in 2020 as an “enemy of the Dutch state” as well.

Here’s the context you need to understand why that matters.

In 2019, the World Health Organization named the Netherlands the country with the best healthcare in the world. Our mental health system — the GGZ — was held up as a model of humane, evidence-based treatment.

One year later, that same system, in cooperation with the Public Prosecution Service, labeled me as: psychotic, a traffic danger, a racist, an antisemite, a pathological alcoholic, a thief, a smuggler, a stalker, a rapist — of clients *and* puppies — and amongst many other things, someone who intended to ritually slaughter five children with a Japanese sword.

At the time I was being labeled this way, I was also — according to Financial Times and EU rankings at least — the highest-rated business educator in Europe at Nyenrode University (2006–2010), spent years afterwards working without pay as a human rights defender for millions of chronically ill Lyme patients, reporting violations to UN Special Rapporteurs. I had my book ‘Shifting the Lyme Paradigm’ published in 2014 with an academic afterword by Professor Cees Hamelink, one of the most respected communication and human rights scholars in the world.

So. Which version is real? And what motives could play on the background?

That question is the heart of what I’ve been investigating for the past five years. Not as a victim — though the experience has been horrific and at points nearly fatal — but as a social researcher with thirty years of experience mapping how complex systems function, often fail, hide that failure and then destroy the people who notice it.

The Pilecki Paradox is the working title of the book I’m working on now, as one of XIII parts of my rather adventurous autobiography. It documents what journalist Nellie Bly already found in 1887 when she got herself committed to Blackwell’s Island Asylum under direction of her boss Pulitzer, what Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan found in 1973 when eight sane researchers checked into twelve psychiatric hospitals across five states, and what I found when I did the same thing in 2024 in Amsterdam — armed with a Macbook, a Hugo Boss shirt and an aim to address similar atrocities to the UN Special Rapporteur.

The findings are not comfortable. They are however well documented and have serious implications for many others. They include footage, testimony, references to other UN and Council of Europe reports and relevant filings on corruption of the legal system. What I found inside those walls wasn’t single stand-alone aberration that could be easily dismissed. It was pattern.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing pieces of this investigation on this Substack channel — chapter fragments, historical parallels, the social psychology of institutional blindness, and the stories of the people I met inside who had no one standing up for their basic human rights.

If you’ve ever wondered how a system that calls itself ‘caring’ can produce outcomes indistinguishable from punishment — keep reading. As Sun Tzu stated it long ago: "All warfare is based on deception”.

The books are soon available for pre-order or to support the whole project. Your support means I can finish it, eat while doing so, and make sure the people whose stories are in it hopefully live to see it published. Parallel to it, I will go on stage as Storyteller in order to touch people’s hearts and Souls rather than their minds only.

A system to pre-order propperly will be made soon. If you want to pledge an amount to continue my work for those suck in there, like the young lady who I officially adopted as my daughter and whose birthday we recently publicly celebrated within fitting context of the CCHR exposition called ‘Psychiatry as an Industry of Death’, you can do so via this Go Fund Me campaign for the time being.

Allow me to introduce myself

As a consultant, writer and researcher with a fascination for servant leadership, social transformation and drivers of collective human behavior I can draw on a background of over three decades in education, social psychology and human rights work. During these years I’ve worked with and for a multitude of organizations, universities and international initiatives. Writing is a way for me to adress relevant questions, reveal potential patterns and open up new perspectives on seemingly fixed realities.