But Hentor, hlanelee was incarcerated by educated professionals carrying out their duties, and by your own admission you know little about how people are actually diagnosed with mental illnesses and treated. Who are you to tolerate hlanelee’s suggestion that the system abused his rights?
:rolleyes:
Guys, I thought it was a better way to display my disgruntlment by having the management subpenoed than showing up with a shotgun, looking for blood. I had options.
Getting back to the OP, if someone will pay for the drugs of MY doctor’s choice and pay him, I will gladly take them. IT’S EXPENSIVE BEING CRAZY and it’s not much fun either.
It is an absolute falsehood to say I have ever said I do not know how people are diagnosed and treated. I am a very skilled diagnostician and good clinician, and do not believe that I have ever said otherwise. I have also never said that abuses do not occur. Have you any information to cite in answer my questions? Apparently not. The entirety of your post in fact appears to be an effort to bait me. Congratulations.
Hentor, your questions about the nature of legal interventions in medical health issues in the post above betray your ignorance absolutely.
You’ve never used words to that effect, but you’ve said it clear as day.
:rolleyes:
hlanelee,
question, what did they tell the police about you that made them detain you?
Didn’t you say, “…by your own admission you know little about how people are actually diagnosed with mental illnesses and treated”? Is that what you meant to say? What did you mean to say? What is the point you are trying to make?
I’ve never professed an expertise in matters relating to involuntary commitment and compulsory treatment. I’ve seen a few hearings regarding specific people, and have provided treatment and conducted research assessments with dozens of patients who were committed involuntarily. But please, I ask you to relieve me of my ignorance and answer my questions for me. With references, of course.
Hentor, my experience with involuntary treatment was forty years ago. But I will share that in the event that it might be helpful. I don’t know if the age of majority was different at that time or not. I was certainly in no position to make a decision one way or the other, but I do know that I was not consulted.
In the early 1960’s when I was about 19, I became severly depressed but I did not recognize it as such even though my father had had severe depression. I do remember problems with bitterness and insomnia, but not really sadness. Eventually, I became mute and my parents were notified.
I was placed in a private mental hospital where I received electro-convulsive therapy every day for a week or so and then every other day for a while. As you can imagine, I remember very little about the experience. In fact, I remember very little about my late teens and early twenties. Bits and pieces and certain times are clearer than others. The shock treatment of the 1960’s was considerably more “drastic” than it is now.
Two years later, I was returned to the hospital for more treatments. I don’t remember if that was voluntary or not. I suspect that it probably was since I knew that it could help.
Two years after that I was forced into a private psychiatric facility by an unscrupulous psychiatrist that I have mentioned before. Because I was suicidal, he threatened to tell the Dean of Students unless I agreed to be hospitalized. At the time I didn’t realize that he couldn’t do that. He also said that I could change doctors after I got there and that I could continue my studies. None of that was true. He kept me for thirty days and when my insurance ran out he released me. He told my parents that I hadn’t wanted to leave. He told me that I couldn’t leave. They refused to pay them. He threatened to take them to court. They said they would tell all that they knew and they never heard from him again..
He had warned them and me, however, that I would be dead within six months by my own hand. The medication that he had given me included, among other things, 300 mg. of thorazine a day. I was a zombie with all of that. My parents were frightened for me and placed me in a state hospital. I was there for days and days without seeing a psychiatrist except I saw my parents talking to him when I was admitted “voluntarily.”
I was physically ill as well, but not allowed to remain in bed. I do remember having to scrub floors and not having a towel to dry off with after I washed because there had been a fire.
Finally, when I realized that I was there voluntarily, I got myself discharged. The psychiatrist that had never interviewed me told me that I was nothing but a spoiled brat.
I spent the next three months with my parents. My mother got tired of seeing me asleep on my feet and cut back on my medication. I started waking up. The more she cut back, the more normal I seemed to be. At the end of three months, I returned to the city and got a job.
The psychiatrist took his own life. I found out years later from a nurse.
Since that time I have been voluntarily hospitalized when my depression has deepened and the anti-depressants have helped some. Nothing helped with any lasting results the way that prozac has. I have had only one episode of deep depression requiring hospitalization in the fourteen years that I have been on prozac. I continue to have low-grade chronic depression. Unhappiness is not longer a major factor, but other problems remain. Prozac has given me a life. I would have been dead without it.
Despite having lost a great deal of my memory from my early twenties, I am grateful that someone did something to help me. My brain was certainly in no condition to decide for itself.
The psychiatrist that I have had for the last fourteen years is one of the most remarkably gifted doctors I have ever known.
The main thing that I would ask that Dopers remember is that the very part of the person that makes the decision about needing or not needing treatment is the part that is not able to function normally. (And I am not talking about eccentricities or artistic differences.)
Greck , they didn’t tell the police anything. The personnel manager told a judge that I was bipolar. He had documentation that I had given him to prove it. Two of my co-workers, under theat of losing their jobs, testified that I had been threatening them and they were afraid of me.
This whole incident was put to an end when their lawyer explained to my lawyer that we had a case and we would win, eventually, but they would appeal. He promised that if we pursued it, he would keep it in the courts as long as possible and put me on the stand as many times as he possibly could. If I wasn’t “crazy” I would be. I have a recording of the conversation.
Your position is noted, Zoe, but your statements regarding the inability of patients to make responsible decisions simply aren’t true for the majority of depressed people. It might be more true of the severely depressed.
So hlanlee, for the purposes of the general discussion, the police had reason to believe (based on false and coerced testimony) that you were an imminent threat to co-workers … a “disgruntled” coworker considering “showing up with a shotgun looking for blood” as an option. But the evidence required to hold you was less than that required for someone who did not have your diagnostic label. And holding you also entailed coerced treatment.
For the purposes of the discussion - what should be the required level of evidience before the police hold someone who witnesses claim is making threats? Should it any way be different for someone with mental illness than for anyone else? Does it depend on which mental illness?
Again, I have no strong views at this time, I’m waiting to be convinced. My bias is that the standard should be the same for those with diagnosed illness as those without; that only a history of violence is enough to make for a looser standard for being held. And if the option is to jail a person with mental illness without treatment or meds, or to hospitalize and then coerce treatment, then what is preferable?
Zoe makes a moving argument in that despite having suffered substanitially from the abuse of power excercised by her past psychiatrist she sees that she was unable to make compentent healthcare decisions on her own in the midst of a severe acute depression.
Unfortunately our justice system is not particularly good at handling mental health issues.
For example, even though there are supposedly standards set up to ensure that the wishes of “mentally ill” but competent people are respected, courts almost always do what they feel is “best” for the person, even when this requires overriding the person’s own judgment and rights.
You can prove this, right? You have some research stats to back it up?
Or is this just your opinion?
This just shows that you don’t really know the minors you think you do, or that you have really skewed views of what’s “capable”
do we need to revive your pit thread?
With all respect to hlanelee, I think two people going to a judge saying that they were threatened by someone is definitely worth some sort of investigation, with documentation of a psych illness; well, I’d say the whole thing happened about as it should have, right up to the part where his psychiatrist was cut out of the deal (did they even request your records at the hospital?) and he wasn’t given a choice of where to be treated. The 10 hour wait, those are all bad things and are failings of our system.
DSeid, everyone has violent impulses, most choose not to exercise them, like me. That’s what makes us different from the animals. I never told anyone about “showing up with a shotgun” until yesterday. I felt it, but never expressed it and there are no “thought police”. The general fear of the mentally ill was manipulated to the advantage of a corporation seeking to avoid a lawsuit that they admitted they would lose
At the time of my detainment, I was under psychiatric care of my own choosing. I was in fact picked up at my psychiatrist’s office, the personnel manager, knew I would be there. I went peacefully, the officer even agreed to handcuff me in front. He was just doing what he was told. As I said earlier I pointed to my doc in the corner and said,“There’s a psychiatrist, ask him for an evaluation.”
A background check on me will reveal a DUI conviction in 1987, seven years prior to my commitment. I have never been accused of being violent. History should mean something.
Hmmmm…
OK, so forced psychiatric medicine is generally seen as a good thing when the unwilling recipient poses a danger to himself or others. What about the current situation where a death row inmate is being given medication so he is sane enough to execute?
Barry
**
http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/151/7/971
http://macarthur.virginia.edu/treatment.html
Bring it on. The evidence clearly shows that there’s plenty of justification for my informed opinions, and very little for yours, based on a comparison of our relative levels of knowledge.
I am ambivalent about the role of clinicians in matters of civil liberties and individual freedoms. I am in favor of regarding the rights of the mentally ill at least equally to everyone else (if not giving preferential treatment as a protected class). Ideally, we would invoke legal sanctions, detentions and other punishments based only on the acts that one has committed. By the same token, I generally dislike the legal distinction regarding the insanity defense, and prefer the “guilty but insane” approach, with the mentally ill receiving the same sentences for criminal behavior, albeit served in a different type of facility. I also dislike being put in the position of being responsible for determining the likelihood that someone is going to present a risk to themselves or to others, or that a child is in danger of being physically or sexually abused. Yet, I am required by law, by self-preservation, by ethical guidelines and by personal morals to be aware of these matters and to act in certain ways. Clinicians have been sued for failures to warn others when a patient gave them indications that they wished to hurt someone else, and have even been sued later by patients themselves for failing to detain them and prevent some undesirable outcome. I would very much prefer to say, “Hey, people are responsible for their own behavior. I’m just here to try to help them when they want it.”
On the other hand, clinicians are in a position in which we come to know about risk factors that have, in other cases, preceded harmful outcomes, and I can understand a societal wish to prevent harm to the greatest extent possible. On the whole, I would like to be able to prevent any harm befalling anyone. The balance is difficult.
Here’s a modified real life example: During my internship, there was a guy on the inpatient unit who had been increasingly paranoid that coworkers and others were out to get him. He began seeing signs of this. For example, when he returned to his work area on one occasion, he found a pencil lying on a book. He was certain that someone had left it there in a particular way to send him a message that they were targeting him. This grew to the point that he believed those out to get him were sending strangers by his house to case the joint and eventually to attack him. He began thinking that he would be proactive and get them before they got him. He did have a gun, and regarded using it in this way as a matter of self-defense. Now, to this point, he has not done anything criminal. In that sense, it is unfair to legally compel him to do anything. However, it seems equally unfair to the family of the guy who is just out for a walk and is shot to death not to try to prevent this from happening. Yet we don’t know for sure that any such thing will happen. What is the right thing to do in this case?
What is our responsibility to the husband of the woman with bipolar disorder who disappeared from home for a week, was found in a hotel room with a young man several hours away, and had spent a good deal of the family’s money. In this case, she seems largely a threat to herself, but not in the sense of being likely to kill herself. Her husband is victimized by her behavior, but is not in danger of death. Is the right thing to do simply to say, “Sorry, buddy. Either grin and bear it or get a divorce” or agree with his wishes and compel her to treatment? In this case, I would prefer to honor individual liberties and lean towards the former, even though her own pain will likely be greater when she comes out of her manic period and finds herself out of a relationship. It seems sad, though, because a friend of mine with bipolar disorder painfully described his experience of having some peripheral awareness about his behavior during the midst of a manic period. He felt like a spectator and had some dismay about what he was doing and what was happening, but was unable to stop himself.
What of the instance in which a young man with bipolar disorder in a manic phase was highly agitated and destructive in his parents’ house, where he was living, and was making threatening statements as he knocked everything from the mantel and broke furniture? Here one might stretch threatening statements into “terroristic threats,” but ITSM that we typically don’t really concern ourselves as a society with people committing vandalism within their own homes. Should the parents endure the behavior, try to engage the police to remove him without regard to his mental health, or to try to engage mental health specialists to hold and treat him, regardless of his wishes?
What of the guy who was depressed and suicidal, and whose wife, during family sessions was as cold and uncaring about his emotional state, his thoughts of self-harm, and his feelings of failure regarding his job loss and career transitions as one could be without being overtly hostile? Eventually, he stopped acknowledging suicidal ideation, though he could not deny a lack of change in his mood, and stated that he wished to leave the unit. Ultimately, with safety contracts and commitments by his wife to remove guns and rope from the house, he did leave. I found out that about 6 or 8 months later, he did kill himself. Regarding suicide, I feel that clinicians should do what they can to prevent people from killing themselves because the likelihood is that their desire to kill themselves will diminish or resolve entirely. However, for some it won’t, and I believe that ultimately if a person actually wishes to end their life, the decision is theirs to make.
TVAA, you told everyone here something very false about me. Specifically you said:
I have asked you to resolve this statement. Either demonstrate that it is true, clarify it or recant. You have had plenty of opportunity and have generated multiple posts since making the statement, but have refused to do so. Pitting you only feeds your need for attention and perversely appears to further your beliefs about your superior knowledge regarding mental health issues. I am at a loss as to what to do.
What difference does it make whether a person’s desire to do something would eventually diminish? Most desires will diminish if people are prevented from fulfilling them for long enough.
Conversely, many people addicted to drugs may try to break their addiction, but eventually fall back into it. Does this indicate that we shouldn’t honor their wish to end their addiction, since their desire to stay off the drugs will often diminish or resolve entirely?
I’ve already told you – your statements in your earlier post indicate that you actually know very little about the realities of patient diagnosis and treatment, since those realities involve the frequent interaction between the medical and legal professions.
I can’t make it any clearer than that – if you still don’t understand, perhaps you should leave.