quote:

Do you really think he should be treated the same way as a person of sound mental health who makes the same threat?

Of course! Do you think we are any more likely to be violent than anyone else who makes violent threats? People of "sound mind" commit violent acts all the time (a great many of them against us, those bearing a diagnosis of "mental illness").

How can you possibly defend holding us to a different behavioral standard under the law?

ONCE AGAIN, may I direct everybody's attention the existence of the competency hearing. Competency hearings are society's way of considering the possibility that a given person is not able to make their own decisions. When you lose them, you get a guardian, and you cease to be a legal adult for all practical purposes. Competency hearings are not concerned with folks' biochemistry, they are concerned with a person's ability to make an informed choice. The individual involved is entitled to due process, and is assumed competent until incompetence is demonstrated in a court of law. If you believe an allegedly "mentally ill" person should not be making his or her own decisions, then, goddammit, have a competency hearing!

Aside from that, you will kindly grant us the same civil rights as any other adult, regardless of professional medical opinions about the healthiness of our thoughts and feelings, which should not be allowed to substitute for due process of law.

 

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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