greck
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1) it's not a medical decision, it's a legal one, one with the protection of the individual and society in mind, one that is made to avoid incarceration, or death.
If it gets you locked up in a place you aren't allowed to leave, incarceration has not been avoided. If it gets you locked up in that fashion when you haven't committed any crime, oppression has not been avoided either.
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2) before you go advocating the abolishment of help for the mentally ill, you might want to meet a few people that genuinely need treatment, they exist regardless of your ignorance of them.
I am not attempting to abolish help for the mentally ill. Or even 'help' for the 'mentally ill', for that matter. I'm trying to abolish involuntary treatment for anyone who is capable of making their own decisions.
Believe me, I've met many many people who were miserable and in genuine need of treatment. Just not the kind of treatment that is meted out by psychiatric institutions. If you were rock-solid unflappably confident, courageous, patient, resourceful, resilient, and stoic, you'd be well-equipped for surviving the incredible assault on self that pyschiatric incarceration imposes. On the other hand, if you were all of these things, what the fuck would you need with treatment aimed at treatment?
This board has many participants who currently or previously sought out the benefits of psychiatric treatment on a voluntary basis, with a therapist of their own choosing, and many of them believe the treatment thus provided saved their lives, or at least made it possible for them to function. I happen to have beliefs about the efficacy of modern psychopharmacology that probably differs from theirs, but I wouldn't dream of making it difficult for them to obtain the help that works for them.
As long as I retain the right to say "no" to the same treatment, or any other.
And Hamlet, you're missing the point. I've been to multiple conventions in halls the size of NY's Javitz Center, crammed with survivors of involuntary psychiatric treatment. I've told my story and listened to those of the others. I don't have access to statistics on rates of involuntary incarceration and the portion of them that involved bypassing or making a travesty of existing safeguards -- how could I? * -- but it's beyond the "acceptable risk" level.
We're talking about the right to be free from deliberate modification of our thinking and feeling processes by another party without our consent. The "acceptable risk" for that kind of thing would have to be akin, percentage-wise, to the rate at which surgeons remove healthy limbs by accident in hospitals. If you could fill a convention center with angry ex-patients who were missing arms and legs because safeguards for ensuring that the operation was only performed on the consenting or those who were incapable of consenting + needed the operation were bent or bypassed, would you need to know what percent of annual amputation surgeries they represented before you figured out that something was wrong?
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For every case you cite where a person's rights are improperly infringed by the law (and not by someone ignoring the law), I can get you three where a non-committed mentally ill person has proven himself a danger to himself or others.
For every case you can cite where a violent person has been charged with a crime and locked up for the protection of society, I can get you three where a non-incarcerated individual has been violent. What's your point? Should so-called "mentally ill" people be locked up more easily if stats show we're more violent on average? Males are more violent on average than females but we don't lock men up. Oh, but the "mentally ill" are a minority. So are black males, and if we don't control for any additional variables our stats may show that they are more inclined to violence than people outside that category, but we at least do them the dignity of arresting them and charging them for something that we say they actually did before incarcerating them, yes?
* I can't give you stats right at the moment, but I'll talk with the people in the NY group who have been doing courtwatch and ask if they have a figure.
Original SDMB thread - Psychology, the law, and being committed
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