Insanity defence in Canada.

Dear Sir: This is in response to Dr. Nichol's appeal for comments or suggestions regarding the difficulties in treating sex offenders within the Canadian Penitentiary Service. It is an accepted therapeutic principle, applying to all branches of Medicine and not only to Psychiatry, that treatment cannot be dissociated from the environment where the disease developed, or the social matrix that contributes to pathogenesis. Psychiatric conditions are, more than any other conditions, usually and closely related to social circumstances. They cannot be treated in a social vacuum. Thus, when it comes to Psychiatry, the therapeutics principle becomes practically a dogma; no psychiatric condition could be treated without a thorough knowledge and possibly the manipulation of contributing social stressors. This cannot be done in a closed system while the system itself feeds the pathology, if not produces it. Treating sexual offenders in a closed environment with the concomital increase of sexual frustrations, the use of homosexuality as a valve to relieve sexual needs, the inmate to inmate manipulation to obtain sexual favours, sometimes via violence, thus increasing the equation sex-violence for individuals who are already prone to violence and the foisting of multiple other regulations against the