Derleth:

quote:

If the psychologist judges him incompetent to decide his best interests, he obviously cannot choose whether or not to take the medication.

Psychologists don't determine competency. It isn't a psychological question, it is a legal question. It is handled in the traditional adversarial courtroom manner, and the person whose incompetency is alleged gets the opportunity to present the case to the contrary. It is ruled upon by an impartial judge.

I am not only not a lawyer, I am also not a criminal justice expert, but I do not believe that any of this changes if one has been convicted of a crime, although of course a person's rights (competent or not; sane or not) are vastly truncated in prison.

As for what appears to be your premise in this thread: you have assumed that if a person has a psychiatric diagnosis and has also committed a violent crime, the reason that person has committed a violent crime is that they are mentally ill?

I know a guy in the movement. Was once assessed as bipolar and locked up and force-treated for several months. He's a pushy, arrogant bastard with a short fuse and he was arrested a couple times for beating his wife. He didn't beat his wife because he's bipolar and needed his medication. He beat his wife because he's an eighteen-carat sonofabitch. He should not be forcibly medicated. (I'd be happy to see his teeth knocked out though).

On the flip side, at the risk of inserting spousal abuse as a topic of this thread, I also knew a woman on Long Island who had been abused for years by her husband, but she was the one with the psychiatric diagnosis. She finally went at him, like Farrah Fawcett in The Burning Bed (I think she clobbered him with an ash tray or something, actually) and he called the police and got her incarcerated for "decompensating" (it was not the first time he used her diagnosis as a weapon against her). Again we have a violent person who, again, had a psychiatric diagnosis. You may or may not argue that she did not have the right to clock him with an ashtray under the circumstances, but for our current purposes let's say we agree that she didn't. Well, she didn't hit him with an ash tray due to mental illness or lack of psych meds, she hit him with an ash tray because he was a wife beater and had hurt her and she wanted revenge. She should have been arrested, not incarcerated in a psych ward, and, if she HAD been arrested, charged, convicted, and sentenced for assault, she should NOT have been forced to take psychiatric medication.

Unless she's determined to be incompetent, which she wasn't.

 

Original SDMB thread - Dear Sister, please take your lithium

 

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See my previous post on this same thread

 

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