ambushed

quote:

It sounds as if you, too, would have been perfectly willing to do nothing and allow my friend's brother, who was seriously ill with schizophrenia, to butcher his mother with an axe, on the theory that "We shouldn't fix what's not broken".

If your friend's brother

a. had not as of yet committed any crime;

b. did not choose to believe himself "sick" or choose to take psychiatric "medication"; and

c. had not been determined to be incompetent through the same procedures by which non-"mentally ill" people can be determined to be incompetent

then the right thing to do is definitely "nothing". As Dr. Paprika says, we are no more likely than you are to haul off and axe-murder our moms.

Of course once he has done so, he should be prosecuted like any other axe-murderer.

quote:

The hard, empirical FACT of the existence of mental illness is beyond any possible doubt.

No. There is a lot of hard empirical data indicating that people who have been diagnosed as having a "mental illness" have statistically significant brain differences from people who are not considered to be "mentally ill". That could mean simply that some people have a biological predisposition to react to certain situations by going "nuts" more readily than others. It could even simply mean that taking neuroleptic drugs over a period of time tends to alter your brain circuitry somewhat (and people diagnosed as "mentally ill" are significantly more likely to have been subjected to neuroleptic drugs).

And when an individual is subjected to psychiatric evaluation, they don't do MRI's on them to rule out schizophrenia or depression or whatever--diagnoses are made on the basis of behavior and are not ruled out on the basis of any empirical lab findings--so most of that hard empirical data is irrelevant to the point I'm making anyhow.

quote:

It is a disgrace to ignore victims' rights and the rights of likely victims in order to let the dangerously mentally ill do whatever the hell they want. It is actually a disgrace to ignore victims of psychiatric assault and the rights of people who haven't committed any crime in order to let proponents of forced drugging do whatever the hell they want.

Let me spell it out for you. If you come after me with a needle, operating under the belief that drugging me up will help me and/or help the rest of society be safe from me, I will consider you dangerous and delusional. At that point our attitude towards each other becomes more or less mutual (although mine is more demonstrably based in observable reality, I think). At that point we can either agree to base further determinations on empirical evidence (like what a person actually did, which is the basis of the criminal justice system), or we fight it out politically (who has the most social pull and therefore the political wherewithal to define the other person's behavior as irrational and dangerous). Because I'm not the one weilding the needle, my political interests lie in establishing laws that define forced drugging as assault unless I'm judged incompetent. The liberty interests of everyone else who is not weilding the needle are well-served by that kind of law, too.

You are attempting to convince them otherwise by bringing up the risk to their liberty interests posed by someone weilding the axe. That is your right, of course, and certainly it is valid as far as it goes.

But, politically speaking, people do not face a systemic institutional threat to the range of their personal freedoms as a result of organized licensed professional axe-weilding schizophrenics. Statistically, you are not at much risk of being hacked to death by crazy people.

A system in which people who are considered to be dangerous on the basis of what they might do, on the other hand, could be a real threat to many people. With no restrictions and overseeing mechanism to stop it from happening, you get a situation in which institutional psychiatry errs on the side of forcing treatment if only to avoid one possible expensive lawsuit alleging that necessary care was not rendered.

 

 

Original SDMB thread: 'Mental illness' and compulsory treatment

See my previous post on this same thread

 

The SDMB Posts