Besides immeasurable suffering and humiliation, the story has another dimension -- money. However, it is hard to determine the cost of my internment and judicial expenses.

My first lawyer, Mr. Goulston sued the psychiatrists and hospitals for $45,000.00 in damages. Legal Aid disbursed approximately $4,000.00 to him. The other lawyers raised the damages to $450,000.00. They were supposed to be reimbursed 40 per cent (on a contingency basis) of the amount which we were expecting to get in the event we won.

Dr. Littmann made a "conservative" appraisal of $600,000.00 as the damage done to me by psychiatrists, while Dr. Vujnovic was of the opinion that my lawyers should charge the psychiatrists at least $3,000,000.00. My opinion is that no money could compensate me for what I had lost and gone through.

If we do take into consideration how much costs the internment of a patient for six months costs, followed by a lawsuit -- the time spent on searching for supportive evidence and attending psychiatric examinations, hiring detectives, locating witnesses, preparing documentation, searching for and meeting lawyers (six of them at least), plus attending 28 days of court hearings -- we could only have a rough idea of how much I spent in cash.

On the part of my opponents we have to take into account that at least one involved psychiatrist at a time was wasting his time over the six months period of my internment. During 28 days of hearings I noticed at least three opponents' psychiatrists were present every day. All of them testified as witnesses, some of them many times, including six expert-psychiatrists, all of them professors.

Besides the "pre-trial examinations of the case" by many judges, lawyers and experts, there was the judge, six to seven lawyers during the trial and always at least one witness. In the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court there were three judges in each.

It is impossible to find out the exact amount of money spent on my case. Thirty days (twenty eight days in the Superior Court, one day in the Court of Appeal and one day in Supreme Court) multiplied by seven (lawyers) is equal to 210 paydays. For one day's attendance in court the least experienced lawyers charged $3.000. If we multiply this number by 210, we come to the sum of $630.000. If we add to this amount the cost of pretrial examinations and preparation of the case and the costs of many witnesses, experts, judges, court clerks, the reader could only imagine the total expenses for "a storm in a teacup", as my internment was called by Dr. Juretic.