Just off the phone with my father, who recalled another soldier in his Army unit in the 1950s who had a run of bad treatment there and vowed to get himself out of his term of service early. The man read all the policy manuals, discovered what the Army would count as mental illness, how it would act step by step toward treating, then discharging him from service, and, most important, where he himself had to draw the line in his performance so that he would be released rather than committed to an endless term in a distant mental asylum. This fellow's performance of mental illness involved riding an invisible motorcycle everywhere he went. Another soldier with similar ambitions used an invisible tape measure to take the dimensions for imaginary window drapes everywhere he went. According to my father, the motorcyclist explained the plan to him in advance and succeeded. It pays to do your research, I guess.