“The Changeling” is a powerful clean indictment of the Beast Machine as it operated in Los Angeles during the 1920’s. Adding to the horror is the reality that too little has changed in the last eighty years.

            Once your life is placed into the hands of the Best Machine you lose control of your family, your life.  Christine Collins life surrendered to the Beast Machine when her nine year old son disappeared.

            Subsequent to this event, the Beast Machine decided she was an unfit mother attempting to avoid her responsibility as a parent, delusional in her attempts to assert the Truth against the failure of the Beast Machine.

            In 1928, a corrupt police captain employed these unsubstantiated allegations to commit Ms. Collins to a psychiatric ward. Today, it is a judge. We can argue it is an improvement, but we are left wondering the extent of the improvement.

            And the mental health professionals twisted the facts to reach the diagnoses they desired back then in the same manner they do today. If you fight, you are hysterical. If you do not fight, you are emotionally detached.

            I could not help but remember Judge Jewell telling me (under “What’s New” November 12, 2008) that she was not going to listen to me about what was best for the children; she was going to listen to the experts.

            When people ask me about Patricia’s diagnoses, I tell them she is diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome as of the result of the imaginary beatings she received from me over the sixteen years of our marriage.  So much, for the mental health professionals.