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Script
PAGE 35 (Four panels)
Panel One: View of Hope, sitting in her chair, cooly regarding the row between Macneil and Lehman.
Caption: I watch the two men muttering angrily in low tones for some time as each pretends to be my defender and protector.
Panel Two: Lehman, with an angry expression, finger jabbing at Macneil.
Caption: Lehman, a true psychiatrist, is committed to helping his patients achieve autonomy and rationality.
Caption: Though only as long as those patients use their rationality and autonomy to make the “right” choices, of course.
Panel Three: Macneil, standing with his arms crossed, presumably facing Lehman, scowling.
Caption: I think Macneil has an inkling of what I’m up to.
Caption: He should be horrified, but he’s a bureaucrat under pressure to crack a case, so I think he’ll override any scruples he has.
Panel Four: Hope, back in the same clothes she was wearing when she was detained by the police, leaning forward over a desk in someone’s institutional office and signing a document on a clipboard.
Caption: In the end, Macneil must have been carrying the bigger stick, because they let me go.
License
(Click on the image for larger size. 
We Must Boost the Signal, Page 35 written and commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com and drawn by Lon Ryden is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.)
The “right” choice would be not to decide to mutilate yourself within 20 minutes of working on a problem and instead corroborate with other researchers. There’s a thin line between madness and genius, but there’s also a fairly blurry line between madness and stupidity
If all characters always did the smartest, least risky things, then stories would be pretty boring, eh?
Doing a dumb thing to advance the plot is an old and traditional piece of story writing – especially for characters of questionable moral fiber.
Real people often do incredibly stupid things that get them into trouble, often despite others telling them exactly how dumb it is. (Like one of my cousins who went and married her boyfriend *after* she caught him in bed with another woman.)
I love it when an author subverts that trope, has a character do the best, smartest thing then finds a totally non-Diabolus Ex Machina way to put the character in trouble anyway.