Question about being PUT in a mental hospital.

Factual Questions
1

Being put in a mental hospital - fairly common in movies from the days of old, as well as modern foreign movies. But does this even happen to anybody who does not plead “not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect” and get sentenced to a bat cave after a determination has been made that you have actually done the crime you were accused of doing in the first place?

What mechanisms are there for keeping a person in a facility against their will under psychiatric pretenses? I am especially interested in any such mechanism that does not involve being charged with a crime. It just seems that the entire concept is entirely incongruent with modern society and medical ethics.

I know that there are systems for people who are deemed incompetent by the state (children, etc.) to be put into care by their guardians, but what recourse do they have, if any?

2

Ok, the short answer is you have to be declared a danger to yourself or others. Trying to commit sucide would do it. Assulting someone, if it was decided to be a result of mental defect would do it. Apparently it’s usually because someone (a parent, possibly the police) makes the case that you are a danger to yourself or others. Then you have to get two doctors to sign off on it, then a judge (the judge might never see you, just take the word of the doctors).

You can appeal after three weeks and say I’m not really crazy.

At least that’s how it works in my state. I get this from my psychologist mother who works at a state mental hospital.

3

Is there a point at which you can intervene and prevent this from happening to yourself? Is it illegal for anybody in question to either a) prevent you from asking for legal counsel through sedation or restraint b) not provide you access to legal counsel of your choice were you to request such? It just seems like otherwise it’s a Soviet-sized loophole for getting rid of people without due process of law.

4

When a parent commits their minor child to an institution it’s considered “volountary commitment” since the minor’s consent isn’t required, right? Do minors have any recourse? Such as when if their parents send them for “treatment” for homosexuality?

5

Is Involuntary Commitment for “Mental Illness”
a Violation of Substantive Due Process?.

6

Hello!

Prelude) Prior to Fall 1979/ Spring 1980, I had had lots of questions about whether or not “something was wrong with me”. I had discovered “counseling” in Junior High when I was miserable and all the other kids were picking on me. As a young adult I would on occasion have astonishingly bad days that would lead me to decide “once and for all” to go to such a person and demand help with whatever unnamed / unknown thing was keeping me from experiencing the joys of life. (It never helped, I never followed through)

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a) In Fall '79, I was a college student, and one of those “bad days” led me to the student health folks, whereupon a doctor was in a rather enthusiastic hurry (for the day) to put me on meds. “We know all about that now and we have a medication that fixes it”. With no more info than that, I was given Stelazine to take by mouth regularly. I did so for 3-4 days and then quit, came back and explained that it didn’t just take away the “bad days” feelings, it took away everything.

b) Across Winter of 79/80, I had a life-shattering revelation of sorts, where explanatory concepts just kind of dropped into place and both my problems and the world and its problems started to make sense, including as an interrelated whole. I got excited, tried to explain what I understood, failed to make sense, upset some people. Representing some of the upset was my dorm RA, who said I should get my head checked out with the nice doctors across the street, and, unthreatened and confident, I complied. At ease, relaxed, & massively sure of myself for the first time ever, I spoke with intake nurses, who also spoke with the RA who accompanied me, and then signed the permission forms. Permission forms: you know, if it’s a surgeon, you agree the surgeon is gonna resect or cut into your injured whatever; if it’s a dentist, you consent to the drill; psychiatrists talk, so I sign what appears to be a form agreeing to “therapy”, and I’m visualizing Freudian couches.

Yeah, I fucking committed myself. They didn’t explain it that way but that’s what it meant legally.

I was entirely lucid, very interested in talking about any of my behaviors and/or thought processes that might have upset anyone, and why they found it upsetting. I was not a danger. But I very definitely got PUT into a mental hospital. No one said I was agreeing that they could hold me there against my will, nor did it say that on the papers I signed. But they could, and did. They took away my belt. They took away my shoelaces. They put me in a room with bars on the windows and an iron door that would only open from a nurses’ station buzzer. And they injected me with psych meds against my will in there, too.

Took me a whole freaking month to start a local chapter of Mental Patients’ Liberation Front and get them to kick me out for causing trouble. I felt damn triumphant at the time (and still do looking back, I admit it) but I also sometimes get a visceral shuddern when I compare my story to that of other folks in the movement (yes, there IS such an org) for whom the system didn’t just recoil and let them go when they resisted.

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b) Two years later my parents were very concerned. They thought I’d rotted my mind for keeps because I had smoked marijuana. Uh oh, drug addict. They said they’d found a place, thoroughly modern, doctors wore jeans and t-shirt like everyone else, they were not going to try to put me on psych drugs. They were against drugs, in fact. They would help me explore whether or not something was truly wrong with me. This was an exclusive, expensive, top of the line place. OK. Yeah, go ahead, kick me hard, I was stupid, and did it again: signed the fucking sheet of paper. Fool me once, shame on you…yeah yeah fuckit I know. Extremely well-funded overstaffed brainwashing lab. Reward-punishment behavior modification. Warm welcome from hordes of the already-inducted showing me around and telling me what I would soon realize about myself. 11 uninterrupted hours of talkative orientation after my flight in, with no chance for me to get a word in edgewise.

But I wrote a poem and taped it to my door. Graphical poem, with the word “cram” getting tigher and tigher until it turned into bricks. Repeated several ways /variations. Then some stuff about how no, you don’t know what I do or will feel because you’re pushing thoughts into me and not letting me return the favor. Pissed everyone off. Unlike the first bin, I didn’t have support of the other inmates. Found out why: you start off on Level 4 and rise by vote and ony get to leave as a graduate and can only graduate as a Level 1. Voting wrong can lower your level. Did I mention it was a behavior mod tank? They would not say what they thought was wrong with me so one day I walked down the hallway at my standard (6 MPH) fast walk and snatched my own file from the nurses’ desk, did an abrupt left past the startled nurse into the nurses’ station, and locked myself in the nurses’ bathroom, which, unlike OUR rooms, had a lock. Hmm. So: I’m a “paranoid schizophrenic with delusions of grandeur”. Paged through nurses’ notes: “Continues to display inappropriate behavior”

I did manage to disrupt them a bit, but ultimately had to take a door off the hinges and hitchhike out of the state to get out of there. Again, comparing notes with other folks who’ve been through the mill, I had it astonishingly easy. Most of their patients came from wealthy families but had no resources of their own so no place to run to, and most of them were in no condition to walk as far as I had to walk to get to a highway; but even so, they were lax and overconfident. Some psych bins are no easier to break out of than prisons.

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c) I’ve spoken with enough people from enough different circumstances to convince me that if they can’t trick you into signing yourself in, they just put you in anyway; that yes, they still do it: did so in the 90s, still do so in the 00s. That if you are causing public trouble (or non-public trouble for well-placed people, including family members, or specifically annoying someone who is an actual psychiatrist, you’re more at risk of being PUT in against your will, whereas some unravelled person seeking help (or on whose behalf some worried relative is seeking help) may be turned away especially if they lack insurance coverage for psych tx. Also, once you amass a psych history, the system tends to view you as a “person in need of treatment” and everything you do gets evaluated in terms of whether or not it’s a symptom for which you should perhaps be locked up. And for unknown reasons some folks just get singled out and held and subjected to involuntary treatment. Google “paul henry thomas” if you want a good example.
d) The conventional standard is that you have to be “a danger to yourself and/or others” and “in need of psychiatric treatment”. The first is subjective unless the person in question has engaged in arrest-worthy behavior, yes? (Or do you think we should be held subject to different standards than the rest of you?) The latter is kind of begging the question.

The conventional standard has been weakened in many jurisdictions to “gravely disabled” + “in need of psychiatric treatment”. Loosely translated: “We think you’re fucking nuts”. I don’t know what standards mainstream folks think are applied, but I can assure you it’s not like they do a blood test for serum schizophrenerase, “Aha, you definitely have schizophrenia and it’s untreated and you’re in danger”. It’s all grossly subjective.

And if they didn’t still do it they would not resist our movement efforts to eliminate involuntary incarceration and treatment. They still do it. We get new movement participants on a regular basis with fresh tales, and folks in the movement who are all to well-known to the psych system who fall on bad days and hard times get dragged back in sometimes too.

7

I’ll have to ask mom about this tomorrow, but the impression I got was once someone made an allegation, it was confirmed by two doctors and one judge, you were in for the three weeks. But then that might just be for “observation”. And there is a due process. And recourse. Hence the necessity of two doctors and a judge. But I’ll ask about the legal issue…I do know she’s testified many times before a judge as to a patient’s being a danger to themselves or others.

8

Mom used to work in the adolecent wing at the hospital and would tell me about the kids who got dumped there because their family was fucked up. But while, sadly, the kids probably didn’t know this, and for that matter wouldn’t have any place to go back to, minors do have the right to contest hospitalization.

9

I don’t think that the judges and doctors are disinterested enough for it to be as much of a “due process” as our legal system: it’s more like the “due process” meted out by military courts.

If the judges and doctors regularly let people go do you think they’d still be on the commital board?

10

AHunter3, very interesting story. I’m sorry that all happened to you. What is your stance on people who do in fact, “need help”?

11

a) In whose opinion, if not their own? What if the well-meaning other person is wrong about them “needing help”, or about what kind of “help” they need?

b) Competent people have the right to make decisions we disagree with. There’s already a process for determining whether a person lacks decision-making capacity and thereby needs a guardian. We do not need and should not have a separate process by which allegedly “mentally ill” people can be incarcerated and treated against their will.

c) The general public is already protected from the violent acts of others though an existing system: the criminal justice system. It’s based on the idea that you can be arrested for what you do. On what grounds should some people be incarcerated on a far different standard, on the basis of what someone else fears that they might do?

12

So when my roomate-at-the-time came out of the house brandishing a kitchen knife and demanding to know what theater another housemate had gone to, so that he could save him from the brainwashing effects of the movie he would see, he shouldn’t have been committed? Mind you, he’s already given away his brother’s cat to save it from the “satanists” down the street, and put his stuff in the yard so that when the letter bombs arrived, it might survive, and he was giving his mail to Matt so that “Saint Matthew” could handle it.

Are you saying he shouldn’t have been committed until his withdrawal (unprescribed) from Prozac (or whatever the cause was) had run its course?

13

In Wisconsin there is a law called Chapter 51, which is an emergency detention, by which a police officer may commit a person to a medical facility against thier will. The criteria is, as mentioned earlier, “A danger to self or others.” There is no need for an underlying criminal act. This is usually implemented after suicide threats have been made. A doctor must sign off on it, and the detained person has the right to be seen by a judge within 72 hours (Three business days) to contest the detainment. It is different from an arrest as it is a civil matter. If my jurisdiction, the detainee was transported by ambulance, not squad car just to emphasize it is a medical issue, not a criminal matter. In most cases I saw the matter was resolved when the detainee was released by the judge with a condition of mandatory medical treatment such as counseling.

14

I don’t know about AHunter3, but I am saying yes you should not have committed a person who did not ask for psychiatric treatment. If smebody is brandishing a knife and is seemingly dangerous, call the cops on them if you feel unsafe or let them be if you do. If I was flipping out I’d much prefer getting shot by the cops than getting dragged away by labcoats.

15

I see what you’re saying, especially since we as individuals are not Doctors and can’t make decisions about someone being mentally ill. But where is the line drawn?

If someone comes up to me in 7-11 (which really happened) talking about how Pocahontas put a magic ring up his ass and he wanted me to look up his ass to see if it were there, then I shouldn’t be entitled to my opinion and try to get this man help?

I understand there are a lot of people out here that are wrongly committed to institutions and held against their will. But there are people out here that should be committed and should get help “against their will”. Some people truly are a danger to society until they get help and the criminal justice system is for criminals, not mentally ill people.

16

Well, just about everything in this post is preposterous. Even if you don’t have first-hand knowledge of mental illness, I would hope Dopers have the common sense to recognize this. I’m going to take a nap, then later I may try and refute it point by point. Suffice it to say, the vast majority of people who need mental health care DO NOT GET IT, even when they themselves beg for it, because IT COSTS MONEY. It is incredibly difficult to commit someone against their will, because to do so COSTS MONEY. There is not some unholy cabal out there searching for innocent victims to confine for fun. Good grief. In every state, what public facilities we do have for this sort of thing are just about maxed out.

17

Ok i’ve asked my mother if someone can be railroaded by this process and she said “yes”.

She’s gotten very cynical working for the state. But I’m afraid not inaccurate.

Still, there is a process, and doctors who have to sign off. And some recourse, technically. But of course sadly, while it’s there, the folks who get comitted don’t know what their rights are.

18

I have to beg to differ …a bit. I agree we don’t want to spend money on anyone but dumping people in a mental hospital, much like dumping them in a prison is what we do, better than spending money on actually helping the situation.

If someone is troublesome and poor, yeah there is an unholy cabal out against him/her.

Or to quote mom’s succint answer: “Whe’ve been over crowded for years. The money people don’t care, it isn’t their money.”

19

I just can’t agree. Your argument seems to be that your preference is held far and wide: Death Before Internment and Treatment. I’m sure this guy’s wife is glad he was only treated for a couple weeks instead of shot dead before she met him.
Come on. Seriously, shot dead? You’d rather be shot dead?

20

You’re doubting the veracity of my personal-history anecdotes? :confused:

You haven’t demonstrated that it’s a nonempty category yet.

which, if you are unfortunate enough to have insurance that will cover anthing the shrinkpeople do to you against your will, gives them a damn good reason to hold you over for a while, now doesn’t it?

True. They believe in what they do. Which makes them no less dangerous and scary, mind you, but no they don’t cackle and twist their moustaches or anything.

Tell it to Paul Henry Thomas. They seem to find room for some of the people some of the time, and to impose involuntary treatment as well as incarceration once they’ve got them. Don’t tell me it doesn’t happen, I know better.