Some of this fear may also be part of their illness. I have worked with incarcerated mentally ill people, and paranoia is (somewhat unsurprisingly) a symptom ma

Some of this fear may also be part of their illness. I have worked with incarcerated mentally ill people, and paranoia is (somewhat unsurprisingly) a symptom many ill people who have committed serious crimes suffer from. That said, I don't particularly want to be involuntarily committed either — it's a frightening thought, especially for those who have been involved in the justice system, where basically nobody cares about you as an individual. You'd want to have some kind of public awareness campaign so people (including potential patients) can see that they're not the asylums of years past. Play up the "spend the day playing checkers in the day room and getting better" part, play down the part where they don't get to leave until the nice people running the place decide enough progress has been made. Getting back to inmates, I spent some time reading feedback form entries about how various inmates felt about their new tablets. I took an excerpt from one and sent it to a couple of product managers — the guy had written up his test cases and findings so professionally they were sure it had come from one our our QA teams. I guess we know what he did on the outside... One of the more paranoid inmates ranted about how his tablet was watching him, tracking his movements, etc., but then complimented us on the selection of movies — I guess I know why he briefly overcame his paranoia and accepted the tablet (they're not mandatory).