TexasCHLforum.com

VMI77 wrote:In the first place, she wasn't coming to the US to visit, she was transiting the US to go on a Caribbean cruise.

"Tranisiting the US" and "coming to the US" both require entering the US.

VMI77 wrote:...if you're focused on the issue of privacy I think you're looking in the wrong place. ... To me, the question of how they knew about the treatment is irrelevant.

But it IS issue and she and her lawyer brought it up, I surmise to pump up outrage about her case, which is bit rich considering her writing a book about it:

From the article in the OP:

At the time, Richardson said, she was so shocked and devastated by what was going on, she wasn’t thinking about how U.S. authorities could access her supposedly private medical information.

Richardson has also spoken to her lawyer, David McGhee, about what she believes to be a “breach of privacy’’

McGhee has sent a letter to Ontario Health Minister Deb Matthews asking how this breach could have occurred...“I’ve asked Deb Matthews to tell me if she’s aware of any provincial or federal authority to allow U.S. authorities to have access to our medical records.

MP Mike Sullivan said what has happened to his constituent is “enormously troubling. . . . How did U.S. agents get her personal medical information?’’

Now I agree that someone who has suffered depression, or is being successfully treated for depression, shouldn't carry a ball and chain around for the rest of her life, but that is not the only issue she raised, and as I pointed out in an earlier post, she points to someone who had significant mental problems for years, way beyond depression and basically said "I was like that." So there may be more going on here than just a simple bureaucratic bit of jackbooting.

As far as letting not letting her in while illegals pour over the southern border -- the answer is the seal that border and stop subsidizing and "attractivizing" (izzat a word?) illegal immigration to buy votes.

1. I have yet to see how guns play into this case.

2. The woman, a foreign citizen, was denied entry into the US. I think our border policy is screwed up in all kinds of ways, but nevertheless, it is true for our nation and many others that the legal protections that apply on US soil do not apply to those entering the country, especially for foreign citizens, and there are all kinds of legal reasons that people can be turned away at the border.

3. VoiceofReason has a point. She herself has put her condition(s) out on the internet, and sought publicity for them. (see her website here: http://ellenrichardson.ca/index.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; )
No doubt in a worthy cause, but one does not have to obtain her private medical records to realize she has had some mental health issues. One can make the argument this is not a good reason to prevent her entry, but it is a big stretch to say that somehow the US authorities got her private medical records.

Just from reading her website you can find out that she is a paraplegic because she tried to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge in 2001 (which has since led her to proselytize against suicide). During this time she states her state of mind was "cleverly portrayed" in the movie A Beautiful Mind. Recall that the movie (based on an excellent book of the same name) was about John Nash, a brilliant mathematician whose life was wrecked for decades by paranoid schizophrenia and delusions (and luckily had a rare remission much later in life). Depression is not a psychotic disease, i.e. there is not a detachment from reality like there was with John Nash. So I have to say it sounds like she had something more than depression.

Again, I am no big fan of our government these days, but their hands are a bit tied in discussing this case. She can say whatever she likes about, but if the border agents are playing it straight, they are no doubt restricted in what they can say publicly about her case. So for the moment we really just have her side of it.

Will withhold further judgement on this one until I hear more.