Life on psych ward is worse than death, says Breivik

Anders Behring Breivik, who is set to go on trial on Apr 16 for killing 77 people in Norway last July, wrote that being sentenced to psychiatric care would be the worst fate imaginable.

“To send a political activist to an asylum is more sadistic and more evil than killing him! It is a fate worse than death,” the 33-year-old right-wing extremist wrote in a 38-page letter, of which the Verdens Gang newspaper published extracts.

The letter aims to discredit, point-by-point, a report by two psychiatric experts, Synne Soerheim and Torgeir Husby, who concluded late last year that Breivik was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and was therefore criminally insane.

If the Oslo court judges reach the same conclusion at the end of his 10-week trial, the confessed killer will be sentenced to a locked psychiatric ward, possibly for life, rather than prison.

Breivik, who has claimed to be on a crusade against multi-culturalism and the “Muslim invasion” of Europe, wants to be declared of sane mind, according to his lawyers, so as not to damage the political message presented in his 1,500-page manifesto published online shortly before the Jul 22 attacks.

“I must honestly admit that that is the worst thing that could happen to me, since it would be the ultimate humiliation,” he wrote.

Breivik claims in the letter that he found more than “200 lies” in the psychiatric report, ranging, according to the newspaper, from small language mistakes to whole paragraphs that he claims Soerheim and Husby made up.

“The problem is that 80% of the content in the 13 conversations [the experts had with Breivik and which they based their conclusion on] is completely made up,” he wrote in the letter.

Reversing roles, the confessed killer questioned whether Soerheim and Husby may have been so traumatised by his attacks that they were unable to be objective and should be considered unfit to evaluate his mental state.