The psychiatric diagnosis that sexual predator Richard Golden is now too mentally ill to manage his personal and financial affairs reeks. It stinks because the fallout threatens to sabotage the emotionally shattered patients’ legal and rightful claim for compensation and closure. It stinks, as well, because the former Vancouver doctor’s mental unfitness was chronicled last spring by his wife and colleagues only after he had sexually assaulted the teens for years.

Moreover, it might enable this guy to skirt arrest and a criminal trial. Golden, you’ll recall, was found by the College of Physicians and Surgeons to have used his status as a highly lauded psychiatrist to target three teenage patients who had naively turned to him for help in battling debilitating depression and eating disorders. Nor was it a sexual-predator-light variety that the 49-year-old wellestablished doctor had set up. Not a spur-of-the-moment grope which, while inappropriate, could be the mark of a mental illness. An investigatory panel found Golden’s trickery was premeditated, well planned and efficiently orchestrated.

“[He] selected the complainants as subjects for sexual exploitation because of the fragility of their family backgrounds . . . and their depression,” the four-member panel concluded last month, at the same time scrubbing Golden’s name from the register. After singling out the most vulnerable young patients, the family psychiatrist began to groom them, vowing he loved them, couldn’t wait to wed them, that his marriage was over. Once his victims began to soften, to trust, he stepped up the pursuit. The creep began booking the sexual appointments late on a Friday or Saturday to avoid detection and had the effrontery to tell one young woman’s physician lies and to medicate her — without proper monitoring — so the sexual romps would continue.

When reckoning for his conduct appeared imminent sometime in late spring of 2005, Golden dumped the young women like so much garbage. He showed, “inherent wickedness, dishonesty and disgraceful conduct,” members of the college said of him.

Are these the acts of a bungling, confused man unable to manage his own affairs? Or of a slick, cagey, self-serving predator who knew exactly what he was doing? Yet none of the crippling illnesses that three fellow psychiatrists recently found had struck Golden, namely depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and attention-deficit disorder, prevented him and his psychiatrist wife, Susan Joy, from jointly billing the B.C. government $615,757 last year for treating patients at their Westside Family Psychiatric clinic.

Granted, the figure represents a record of gross payments — meaning it covered overhead, salaries and other expenses related to their practice. But don’t you think a couple, even with a combined income of onethird that, might have accumulated some assets during 25 years of marriage?
Not the Goldens.

In court affidavits used to successfully obtain legal control of her husband’s personal and financial affairs, the 48-year-old mother of two describes the family’s assets: A couple of cars with a combined worth of less than $10,000, a bank account with a couple of grand, an RRSP worth $10,000 and some household furnishings. Add in a hefty line-of-credit debt and they’re in the hole, big time. There appears to be little left for the suffering victims, although Golden reports she continues to earn $5,100 a month while her husband is receiving a $10,525 a month disability allowance.

As for criminal charges, there haven’t been any. The reason may be a reluctance on behalf of the victims to wrestle with the criminaljustice process. Then again, the court ruling that Golden is currently incapable of managing his affairs may have investigating officers wondering, should they bother? On behalf of the victims and the public, the answer is a resounding yes.


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