Below is an important historical document surveying the challenges to the Oregon State Hospital’s Forensic Program from March 1986. It was created by Jim Carlson, a bureaucratic wizard who worked for both the state and for Multnomah County, and is a snapshot of the intense gobbledygook of mental health administration.

The report shows how the population of the hospital’s ‘forensic’ program, which was a common euphemism in the psychiatry business for persons who are imprisoned at the psychiatric hospital because they have plead guilty to a felony but were found to be insane, had quickly grown since the mid-1960s. The culprits were the mismanaged Psychiatric Security Review Board and the baby boom. It is an argument for more staff.

READ – Forensic Psychiatric Program – 1986, from March of 1986