Suppose a young adult becomes schizophrenic, but doesn’t realize he is ill (which, as far as I know, is quite common). How do you get a person to go on the drugs to see if they like the result or not if you can’t forcibly medicate them? Or can you? I don’t know what the laws are, but I think maybe when you end up in the nut house, you are automatically giving drug authority to the hospital. Is that a state-by-state thing? Are there any states that simply stay out of it? Sorry this is such a disconnected post. Sometimes my brain just works that way.
The problem is, The Ryan that your arm at a given point in time is broken or it is not. Mental illness can be fleeting, and we’ve all had our doubts about you at one time or another. It could happen to anyone.
Not all broken arms cuase pain and prevent you from functioning properly. If you happen to have such a broken arm, is “why fix what’s not broken” really a good attitude to have?
What about if the person is only a danger to themselves, and not to society at all? Should they then be forced into treatment?
What if the ‘mental illness’ is alcoholism? If the person refuses to quit or go into treatment, then what?
Sure. Just because you don’t want to fix what isn’t broken doesn’t mean you won’t fix what is broken (like an arm).
More seriously, there are two reasons that a broken arm is qualitatively different from a mental illness. First, there is a demonstrated link between letting a broken arm go untreated and having future disability, and secondly, the causal mechanism involved is well-understood.
That’s not the case with mental illness. Many people experience a mental illness chronically, with periods of wellness in between. Some people only experience symptoms once. A few people even stop experiencing any mental illness for no reason that we can figure out.
And yes, if a person with a broken arm chooses not to have it treated, that is their decision, and I would not advocate forcing treatment on them–even though the treatment for a broken arm has a much higher success rate than that for any mental illness that I know of.
You made a point earlier, that putting the mentally ill in jail or treating them like everyone else aren’t the only options. And you’re absolutely correct: mental competency hearings are the middle ground. AHunter3 knows more than I do about such things, and could probably fill in the details.
What Myth??
My friend’s mother was butchered WITH AN AXE by her schizophrenic son!!
How can you people – at least the sane among you (for I understand AHunter3’s irrational and desperate need for denial) – so recklessly ignore and deny the truth??
I have been asked by my friend to be discreet, so I will not provide a link to the story; all I feel comfortable doing is saying the incident took place in a major mountain state city within the last several months.
There was no reasonable doubt that the murderer was insane and not taking his medication, but neither the mental health system nor the judicial system could do a damn thing about it. And that’s just damned WRONG!
Why are so many of you so foolishly determined to spit in this wonderful woman’s face while tripping over yourselves to see who is more politically correct about worshipping the dangerously mentally ill?
Cases of competing rights occur all the time. Should the severely mentally ill have rights? Absolutely! Should their rights to refuse to take their medication when their illness is quite foreseeably dangerous override our own rights to life and safety? HELL NO!
Exceptional cases make good TV, but lousy law. I’m sorry about your friend’s mother, ambushed, but paprika could still be right about it being rare, even incredibly and vanishingly rare. What about the people with friends’ mothers who have been forced into institutions? I’m sure they’d violently disagree with you on where their rights begin or end.
And how, exactly, does one seperate the dangerous mentally ill from the harmless mentally ill? We can’t even do that with sane people!
And you call me stupid? Well, AHunter3, you’ve certainly convinced me of one thing: You’ve powerfully reinforced my belief that forced treatment is an absolutely essential option that must be made available as soon as possible. I’m more convinced after reading your not-apparently-stable tirades than I had been previously.
I hope you enjoyed spitting in the face of my friend’s butchered mother, by the way.
I think there’s less humor in your words than you possibly imagined.
That’s not what I said. Perhaps your illness interferes with your reading skills, too.
I said that, within sound judicial bounds, a severely mentally ill person who is found (yes, perhaps by a cohort of MDs and a judge in a proper hearing) likely to be dangerous should be given the option of strictly following his prescribed medical regimen in open society or being confined to an instution where he or she would be free to reject treatment. And I don’t give a damn if you think that’s not politically correct enough for you or doesn’t fit with your delusional, crackpot theories of mental illness. If you want a perfect solution, try Heaven. On Earth, we must make due with less than optimal solutions, although we must always excersize cautious and sound judgement to try to make our solutions as optimal as is practicable.
More reading problems, I see. I explicitly stated that I want such decisions to take place within the context of proper judidical bounds with credible medical experts providing sound evidence.
Furthermore, I’ve already been diagnosed with a mental illness (depression). Should credible scientific medical evidence reveal that I was a danger to myself or others, I absolutely would willingly submit myself to the option I described above. You’d have to be insane to not want your loved ones protected from you if you posed a real risk! While I have no persuasive medical evidence that you pose a physical threat to others, if I lived in your home I would not be so cavalier as to take your word for it, I promise you.
Naive enough? It’s not naive. Realistic and self-honest enough? Yes! Your mystico-political (and quite irrational) view of mental illness – combined with your illness itself – is what probably leads you to reject science and the medical model of mental illness in the first place.
That is not scientism, whatever you would prefer to believe. I know perfectly well that individual scientists and medical practitioners are not immune to error. But earlier, you wisely referred to a cohort of experts in making the determination in question. While I also understand perfectly well that even
a qualified cohort of experts can also be mistaken, it’s the very best we can get and its a very great distance from being arbitrary. Clearly, if it were up to you, you’d let anyone at all with even the most severe cases of mental illness run free to butcher anyone they want before you would approve of taking any action. The idiotic “philoshopy” of libertarianism is patently at root in your unsound thinking. Sane people agree that reasonable safeguards and prevention is overwhelmingly to be preferred over post-butchery retribution!
No.
Are you stupid enough to think you’re thinking fairly and rationally?
What a reckless assertion! So allegedly “exceptional” cases don’t merit our concern and we should just ignore them?
Pray tell, how many suicidal pilots have deliberately crashed commercial airliners into American office towers? If I recall correctly, there were only two. If we follow your line of thought, we should just ignore them because they’re “exceptional”.
Who the hell is talking about forcing people, willy-nilly, into institutions? All I ask is that they take their medications if they’re going to live among us. My guess is that a weekly or perhaps even monthly urine or blood test would confirm or disconfirm that they’re taking their medication. We do the same sort of thing now to confirm that former convicts are NOT taking drugs. What’s the big deal? Please spare me your politically correct sanctimony! We’re not talking about vigilantes, we’re talking about laws that must pass through legislatures and be administered responsibly. I don’t see you volunteering to house the dangerously insane with your spouse and kiddies, so please descend from your high horse.
Yes, indeed – some of them would violently disagree!
Just laws are extremely difficult to craft, I fully realize. But if it were up to people like you, we would blithely surrender all hope of acting responsibly to protect the innocent from credible, scientifically foreseeable risks! Such Pollyanna optimism is hardly short of delusionary thinking. You can’t sweep difficult problems so blithely under the rug!
What a load. We’d do it much the way we’re doing it now! Hill’s grossly obsolete hatchet job (from 1983!) that AHunter3 references is but a sloppy joke. Objective medical tests such as fMRI and PET and other methodologies are supplementing the old subjective testing methods. While perfection in diagnosis is still out of reach, the latest medications are NOT as unpleasant as the politically correct advocates for the seriously insane will have you believe.
Sane, rational people know better than to believe this problem is intractable. It is NOT the nightmare situation you imagine it to be, except perhaps for the victims of the murderously mentally ill.
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.
What would YOU have done to protect this wonderful woman who knew that without his medication her son was terribly dangerous?
You’d ignore her, no doubt.
Certainly it does. Clearly, you have never suffered from one or you’d probably know for certain the truth of its undeniably real existence. My clinical depression had destroyed my life! And my medication – once my doctor and I found the right one – unambiguously restored most of it.
But you CAN see mental illness! Not on X-ray, but on fMRI and PET scans, for example.
The hard, empirical FACT of the existence of mental illness is beyond any possible doubt. The causes and/or effects are visible in a number of more objective measurements, such as the functional MRI and PET scans I mentioned. I’ve seen scores and scores of medical imaging photographs and videos that make it’s empirical, medical existence an absolute certainty. Contrary to AHunter3’s and others unjustified assertions about “diagnostic crap-shoots”, the inadequacy of the medical model, and his reference to the obsolete hatchet job of this Hill character, do yourself a favor and perform a bit of research on your own on PubMed and see for yourself that, while all legitimate scientific findings are always cached wisely in cautious and undogmatic language, the combined weight of the scientific evidence has demonstrated beyond any rational doubt that serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia are all too objectively real.
Here are just a very small number of recent links:
www.nimh.nih.gov/events/prcomt.cfm
www.health.harvard.edu/medline/Mental/M0402c.html
Note that there is a great deal of older work that has irrefutably established a hard, empirical basis for the very successful “medical model” for mental illness, while there is virtually no credible scientific evidence in favor of any other model.
I don’t see how any of those affect the validity of my analogy.
Sure. That’s their decision. But what exactly constitutes a broken arm is not their decision.
People who suffer from severe cases of schizophrenia are most assuredly “broken”!
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”.
Society must be very badly broken as well for people such as yourself to believe that’s a rational attitude.
The point about schizophrenic murders is not that they never happen but that they happen with similar or less frequency than murders committed by people without schizophrenia.
Had you read my post, I think it is clear I think mental illness exists. I don’t really challenge that; the rhetorical question was from another post. To quote me out of context is unfair.
Broken arms usually hurt. A lot. You’d probably want to use a better analogy.
ambushed
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.
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.
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.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by ambushed *
**
Who the hell is talking about forcing people, willy-nilly, into institutions? All I ask is that they take their medications if they’re going to live among us. My guess is that a weekly or perhaps even monthly urine or blood test would confirm or disconfirm that they’re taking their medication. We do the same sort of thing now to confirm that former convicts are NOT taking drugs. What’s the big deal? Please spare me your politically correct sanctimony! We’re not talking about vigilantes, we’re talking about laws that must pass through legislatures and be administered responsibly. I don’t see you volunteering to house the dangerously insane with your spouse and kiddies, so please descend from your high horse. **
The part I have the biggest problem with is " they take their medications if they’re going to live among us." I hope these are still human beings you are talking about, in which case it would seem they already do live among us. It sounds like you are willing to sacrifice one group of people’s rights for another. Yes, former convicts are sometimes required to submit to drug tests, but the difference is, they have already been convicted of something. I really don’t think psychiactric facilities and medication are as fullproof or the cure-all you seem to think they are. I’m not arguing that they don’t have benefits, but I am saying that they don’t always help.
I am sorry for your friend’s loss, but I see you using that as a justification for blanketing the mentally ill into a category of potentially dangerous people who need to be forced into taking medication or locked away. When others try to point this out, you seem to take on the view that we are being PC or somehow had a hand in your friend’s loss. I’m not sure of the details in the particular situation you talked about, but in my experience, when someone (mentally ill or not) is physically threatening another human being, that is grounds for some legal action to take place. I don’t know why the system failed your friend, but I don’t think the solution is to punish people who didn’t have a hand in it.