If you tried to hook me up with such a pump without my permission, I would be within my moral rights to kill you, and would do so.

To force someone to take mind-altering chemicals on an ongoing basis without their consent is considerably more of a violation than anything that should be remotely legal.

Zette:

quote:

For what it's worth, a lot of people who are mentally ill are very much against any sort of forced incarceration/meds and believe they have the right to refuse medicine just like a diabetic can.

Thank you Zette. Yes, we're mad and we're organized. (Well, sort of. Please ignore the state of our current nationals But we are politically active at any rate)

Glancing back over this thread once more, I am struck by the following:

If Chas E's sister has indeed been deemed incompetent in a competency hearing (a legal process of which I approve), she by definition can't possibly be the legal guardian of her children and for that matter does, again by definition, have someone appointed to be her own guardian, unless the hearing has JUST transpired and the final determinations of guardianship have not been completed. That is the nature of a competency hearing.

If Chas E was equivocating (unintentionally if so, I would imagine) between a competency hearing and a psychiatric commitment hearing, I must point out that even a person who has been deemed to be "mentally ill and a danger to self and/or others" (the traditional commitment standard) has the legal right to refuse medication even in a locked inpatient setting. This right was established in New York in the court case Rivers and Zatz vs Katz; legal opinions in other states (let along outside of the United States) may vary.

But they should not. In fact, commitment hearings themselves should be unconstitutional, since they are mechanisms for locking up a person involuntarily on the basis of what they might do. In the absence of a competency hearing, (which, as I said previously, respects due process and protects individual rights), the individual, whether "normal", "schizophrenic", "bipolar", or discernably nuts in some other fashion, is entitled to the legal assumption of being capable of making decisions (and living with their consequences).

The potential for abuse of the power to commit (and to impose forced treatment) is not hypothetical, we're talking real world and genuinely nasty abuse here, folks.

So you know what you can do with your pump, right?

 

Original SDMB thread - Dear Sister, please take your lithium

 

See my next post on this same thread

See my previous post on this same thread

 

The SDMB Posts