Quote:LilFluff wrote:Odds are pretty good The Professor would easily fall under the third. He only gets this way when he puts off going to sleep... "going off his meds", so to speak. Surrounding himself with "enablers", as Jeph put it, in other words, people who don't seem to do anything to try to get him to "take his meds" like he should, only compounds the issue. Treatment would probably be teaching him the habit of going the hell to sleep every day, without fail, and eliminating things like caffeine, while at the same time trying to get him to work on recognizing when he's sliding into the Blue Hair space, and to take appropriate measures to keep himself from harming others. Ideally, he gets others to help him recognize this and assist with the appropriate measures.
I Am Not A Lawyer... but my understanding is that in the US, for most people who invoke the insanity defense it is very, very far from being a Walk Away Free card. Instead it is a, Congratulations You Get Involuntary Psychological Treatment Until Cured card. With an emphasis on the word until. IIRC I recall reading that on average such terms lasted about twice as long as the resulting jail time from a criminal conviction. Sure it's time in a mental facility rather than prison, but you are still there involuntarily and not allowed to leave.
And the insanity plea is separate from determining competency to stand trial. Which can also potentially result in your being committed to an institution and treatment aimed at bringing you back to competence (whereupon you get to go on trial).
According to A Case of Insanity US States have started adding Guilty But Mentally Ill as a verdict option, where you are committed to an institution for treatment - and should you ever be deemed sane you then serve out the sentence for the crime. A short of Insanity Plea-Lite where the jury decodes that yes you are mentally ill, but not to such a degree as to absolve you of guilt.
(As an aside, Real Life Myk and I have discussed the problem of recidivism
among criminals because of the problem that they can wind up hanging
around the same people who enabled the behavior in the first place.)
In the Handwavium Safety Course, Myk will point out The Professor as a... highly undesirable type of biomod. He lists getting any range of obvious physical mods (fur, greatly reduced height, oddball skin colors, glowing black light eyes, etc.) to be infinitely preferable to the "can stay awake for days without noticing, but progressively nuttier and possibly going to commit crimes against humanity" biomod. Although he will generally only pull it out if he recognizes that someone in the class is going to cavalier on the level of an episode of Jackass, specifically to frighten them into paying attention to procedure.
Quote:Cobalt Greywalker wrote:Recognizing that he gets crazier as he lacks sleep is one thing... but regarding the enablers in his midst, and that he's probably more than willing to understate how long he's been awake for (or worse, is literally unable to track how long it's been since he last hit the pillow past, say, five minutes), would make such difficult to do unless there is insistence that he debarks from the ship, right into a sleeping berth, with the door locked until he's actually slept for at least eight hours.
At the very least, the SMOF KNOW that the
Professor gets crazier the longer he's been awake. I'd say it was
reasonably well known to the admins of Fen ports. So why have they not
instituted a 'you're not allowed to dock if you've not slept in exty
hours' policy? (where exty is up to the faction/port concerned)
Did the controller in charge assume (due to the Professor's rep) that
the Professor was smart enough to KNOW when he'd be allowed to dock and
wouldn't bother to request permission if outside those limits?
The controller in charge probably won't lose their job over it (few people realize how bad these sorts of things really are until they're slapped in the face by them)... but they're probably not going to be the lead at the console for a while.
--
"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor