Echokitty, I will compose a post later on in which I will voice my opinions on what I think should be done instead, but let me be clear on this much: my inability to provide a viable alternative in no way excuses imposing forced psychiatric treatment on competent people. Sorry, but one of our classic pet peeves is people asking us "But if forced treatment is wrong, what are the alternatives?". Well, gee, one alternative is "don't do it". There may be other things that can also be done, but there's no reason that discovering them should be our responsibility, is there? The inherent wrongness of forced psychiatric treatment stands regardless.
Dr Paprika, you are right at least to a degree. Certainly there are people who benefit personally from psychiatric drugs, and more power to them (and their supportive shrinks!), as long as this isn't used to excuse forced treatment. And I do acknowledge that I've oversimplified the range of psych diagnostic categories. Nevertheless, "mentally ill" is used as an explanatory device whenever otherwise inexplicable and disturbing behavior rears its proverbial head, and once the label has been applied, the behaving person is at severe risk of depersonalization and stigmatization, not just the informal kind pertaining to people's attitudes and beliefs about them but also the formal kind having to do with fundamental freedom and rights and access to social privileges enjoyed by those not so labeled.
Right now, in this [ref. del.] thread, we have a self-identified mental health professional stating that anyone who would attempt to have sex with their pets is mentally ill. And, indeed, I would not be remotely surprised if a person who was found to be doing that were to be escorted to the emergency room and committed on the basis of that behavior to involuntary psychiatric incarceration. But I could not have concocted a better example of the conflation of "crazy disturbing lunatic behavior we don't understand" with "mentally ill" if I'd been left to my own devices, and therein lies a good portion of the problem: if, as you say, the formal diagnostic criteria for the various name-branded mental illnesses are considerably tighter than I've described them, the fact remains that in practice, especially with regards to forced treatment, those criteria are applied in a very loose manner.
The first time you sit in a NARPA convention hall stuffed with people who were involuntarily subjected to forced treatment for being "nuts" (usually in ways considerably less weird than shtupping the puppy), it modifies your perspective on the issue in a really fundamental and permanent way.
Original SDMB thread: 'Mental illness' and compulsory treatment
See my next post on this same thread
See my previous post on this same thread