Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry - Mental Health Laws and Treatment (Compulsory)
Here is the cover page of the book "Law, Liberty and Psychiatry" by Thomas Szasz, one of the greatest critics of psychiatry
What is Mental Illness: Abnormal clusters of thought, mood, and behaviour that grossly impairs judgement and perception of reality
Mental Illness Disease or Derogation?
Classification in Psychiatry
Commitment of the Mentally Ill
False Commitment
Testamentary Capacity/Competence: The capacity to judge the outcomes of taking vs not taking treatment.
Crime and Mental Illness: A critical survey of Forensic Psychiatry
Criminal Responsibility
Acquital by Reason of Insanity
The Right to Trial
In Hospitals, mental patients fight for basic freedoms
The Abridgment of the Constitutional Rights of the Mentally Ill
Ethics and Psychiatry
Politics and Psychiatry
Toward the Therapeutic State
Proposals for Reform in the Mental Health Field
Forced Psychiatric "Treatment" is Torture!
Peter Breggin, MD By Peter Breggin, MD June 19, 2016
Torture often has a straightforward goal—to break the victim’s will and to intimidate others who fear that torture will also be inflicted on them. Anyone who has worked or been a patient on a psychiatric ward has witnessed daily attempts to break the will of patients by limiting their freedom and activities, treating them like children, making threats, using physical restraint and isolation, and ultimately inflicting drugs and electroshocks that render the individual helpless. The most profound impact of neuroleptic (antipsychotic) drugs is to render the individual indifferent, apathetic and docile; but the drugs commonly continue to inflict physical and mental torment.
Abolishing involuntary treatment is easily justified under the Bill of Rights, including sections that pertain to due process, protection from cruel and unusual punishments, and the protection of freedom of speech. Involuntary treatment has no place in a society that values the rights of the individual. Nor is it “humane” or “kind” to lock up and drug people against their will. If these people thought psychiatric treatment was humane and kind, they would have chosen it. To superimpose upon them the will of professionals devoted to psychiatric theories and practices that do more harm than good is neither human nor kind; it is simply oppressive.
How a Community Treatment Order Works
Please Vote on the Poll!
We are talking about people being treated against their will, even if it is deemed by the psychiatrist that it is in the best interest of the patient to continue treatment.
Are you for abolishing forced psychiatric interventions, or are you for the status quo (then vote no).
A community treatment order gives the treating / supervising psychiatrist the authority to coerce the patient into treatment:
How does the psychiatrist coerce the patient under a CTO?
The psychiatrist can write an apprehension order; if the patient refuses treatment. The apprehension order authorizes police to apprehend the patient to a mental health facility for an "examination" by two physicians, one of whom must be a psychiatrist. The two physicians will decide whether to admit the patient to hosptial. If they release you from hospital, they cancel the CTO. They may also release the patient from hospital without canceling the CTO. Or they may admit you to hospital. Once admitted the following can happen. The psychiatrist may apply for a treatment order to the Alberta Mental Health Review Panel; if the review panel authorizes the treatment and finds that the treatment is in the patients "Best Interests" (legal test), then the treatment is given , otherwise the patient is let go. Or the psychiatrist may declare a patient incompetent to make treatment decisions (by Mental Capacity Act), then the patient goes to the review panel to prove their competency, once it is questioned. Mental capacity or competency means you can understand and appreciate the consequences the treatment and lack of treatment, can weigh the results , make a decision,and communicate the decision. Competency has to do with your capacity to make the decision for yourself. not whether the psychiatrist has to agree with your decision. Even if the patient's decision is demonstrably unwise, and corroborated by professional opinion, but as long as you have the right mental capacity; then you can avoid being treated against your will.
So, let us review: the psychiatrist can cause a patient to be hospitalized ; hospitalization can (but does not necessarily ) lead to you being treated against your will. If however the treatment is objectively not in your best interest and you can demonstrate mental capacity to make treatment decisions for yourself, then the CTO can order the police to take you to hospital, but no one will order the treatment, because you don't meet the other criteria. It is a highly coercive scheme designed to keep patients on treatment; comply with medication.
Would you abolish CTO's for people diagnosed with so called mental illnesses?