That is simply not true. Learn the facts before making sweeping statements.
I was asking how far you extend your policy of forced medication and treatment for people who do not pose a threat.
Did I say that? No.
:rolleyes:
laigle, I may or may not be unaware of actual events around me, I may or may not be a danger to people, and on these matters you don’t have any easy way of discerning. All you know is that a psychiatrist once diagnosed me as paranoid schizophrenic.
Do you propose that I should be locked up against my will indefinitely?
Your mental disorders are a medical condition. I don’t advocate “locking you up” or indeed doing anything at all regarding the criminal justice system. This is not a criminal case.
Similarly, I would be in favor of forced medical treatment for someone who has shattered their elbow playing tennis, or who contracts teburculosis, and insists on ignoring treatment.
Why exactly have you decided not to seek treatment, by the way? It sounds like you recognize the disorder in yourself, and are intentionally avoiding treating it, which makes as much sense to me as getting stabbed in the leg and trying to walk it off while it bleeds.
Treatment for paranoia/schizophrenia is almost never a “lock them up” case. I seriously doubt that anyone who has not committed a crime has been involuntarily incarcerated for this disorder, and certainly not without either harming or attempting to harm themselves or other people. I personally know a severe paranoid schizaphrenic, who has made death threats and done violent damage to property due to his condition, and endangered his child’s life during one particular episode while he was driving (an episode that ended with him in the hospital and his car completely totalled), before he was treated for the condition. His treatment involves psychology and medical prescriptions.
OK, so TB is a public health issue - but why on earth do you want to impose treatment on somebody with a broken elbow?
Yeah, I wanna know too. Was that a typo?
According to an article that was in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2002, only .03% of schizophrenics are convicted of a violent crime each year. We can’t look people up because they might become violent. They are human beings! You might have a brother or child who is schizophrenic. Can you imagine having that person removed from your family?
And think of how many groups might end up on that list as “potentially violent.”
Have you applied for Social Security? That won’t help with medicine much, but Medicare does make a big difference in what you are charged to see a physician. And maybe there will be relief soon for expensive medications. It is a hassle to apply, but there are people who can help. I have a permanent disability because of chronic depression. (My illness responds well to medicine, but the medicine has side effects which also cause problems in functioning normally.)
Who’se we?
You’ve described people with AIDS, and they are certainly not quarantined.
If that’s the case, why do I see so many people driving down crowded city streets at 40mph with all their attention riveted to their cell-phone. I had to swerve to avoid one of these self-obsessed assholes today. Clearly he was a threat to me and himself.
EsotericEnigma:
- Because I like me the way I am and I do not wish to be normal.
Allegory time: Not too terribly long ago, gay folks were regarded as being not merely different but sick. (In fact, it would not have been unusual for someone to receive a diagnosis of schizophrenic as a consequence of being homosexual). And “normal” (i.e., hetero) people of that time had no comprehension of how or why anyone would or could embrace such a difference. But nowadays most of us have a better grasp of gay pride. We understand that, occasional exceptions aside, most gay folks do not wish they had been straight instead; they would not embrace a therapeutic “conversion” to heterosexual if one were available and would wage a political fight against one if it were proposed that a conversion be forced upon them. Because they like the way they are. So do I. Think of it as “schizzy pride”.
- Because the institutions that have the forced treatments don’t have a cure anyhow.
What they have is an arsenal of pharmaceuticals. Those pharmaceuticals have varying effects on our neurological functions, most of them muffling the tendency of nerve cells to do what nerve cells do: synapse. This is especially true of the class of chemicals that are prescribed for schizophrenics. No matter what you may have heard, these meds are not to schizophrenia what insulin is to diabetes. They are more akin to what demerol is to someone with a killer migraine. Taking demerol will enable some migraine sufferers to think coherent thoughts instead of being incapacitated by the pain, but for others the medication just muffles everything and puts them in a drugged-up haze. So it is for psych meds. They help some of us with symptoms that we find unpleasant. For others, they are worse than the symptoms they purport to treat. Oh, and they are risky, and tend to cause permanent brain damage if you use them for a prolonged stretch. Me, I’ll pass.
- You would really advocate forcing elbow reconstruction surgery on an adult who did not consent to it? Astonishing. Would you force open-heart surgery on an adult with a cardiac condition who preferred to just see if diet and good luck would get them through? If the enthusiastic neurologist who lives down the street from me decides you have Tourette’s, is it OK if he has you strapped to the operating table while he does a little experimental surgery on your hippocampus?
I am not a disease. I appear to have a difference which I share with other people. I am an activist in a pluralistic society saying that I like who and how I am. I break no laws and I want no cure.
Oh, btw:
You are wrong.
I wish you were right, but you’re not.
Snort
I trained in the “D building” of the old Baltimore City Hospital.
Pull the other one, it’s got bells on it.
QtM, MD
AHunter3, FWIW, you certainly don’t sound like someone with paranoid schizophrenia, who happens to be untreated.
Is there research to find a better way to treat this disorder, so people WON’T have to go around in a drugged up haze? So it could be something like anti-depressants, that are used to restore a chemical imbalance?
might one not legitimately distinguish
danger to others
from
danger to self?
I’m far less uncomfortable with a preemptive involuntary intervention where homicidal ideation is demonstrable; suicidal ideation, on the other hand, is really no body’s business.
Your points are not based on any logic that I can see. Paranoia and schizophrenia are medical conditions. Would you let a chipped tooth fester because you like the way you are, and don’t want to be normal? That’s just plain absurd. If treatment exists, there’s no reason not seek it, especially in such a severe case like this.
I would not force elbow surgery on someone who has broken their elbow. I would force medical treatment for the broken bone if they insisted on leaving it broken. This point doesn’t matter anyway, because I doubt anyone with judgement that is not impaired would intentionally avoid treatment for a broken bone. Surgery is not the only form of medical treatment. In fact, it’s one of the least used forms.
Also, read above for my response to your hypothetical heart surgery patient. Seeking treatment for his ailment through proper diet and activity is still seeking treatment. Diseased hearts can and have become healthy through this method.
Honestly, I can’t understand the stand you have taken here. You talk and debate like a person entirely in their right mind, but the end result of your arguments lead exactly where many other paranoid schizophrenics go, which is “I don’t need treatment.” The fact is, you DO, and the disease itself is what prevents you understanding this, the same as it prevents so many others with your same condition.
That’s creepy.
You just can’t do that. People have their agency.
For example, most of the people in my family are “crackpots,” in that we believe in herbal cures and therapies. Not all of them, but some of them, some of the time. I have “cured” minor toothaches with goldenseal tea and I have “cured” other ailments by using teas instead of over-the-counter medicines. Some of these “cures” are deemed to be worthless by mainstream society, but I feel they have worked for me. One of my sisters (who is otherwise the most sane and sensible of the bunch) believes in homeopathic medicine and has inflicted it on her family from time to time.
If we prefer our “crackpot” cures instead of mainstream, medically proven ones, would you force us to be cured in the way that you see fit? Why? And if not, how is that any different than forcing someone with a broken elbow to get it “treated”? Maybe they are getting it treated, but in a way that they prefer (juniper berries, or who knows?).
Medical conditions that are not well understood even today. I don’t believe “paranoia” is considered a disorder in and of itself anymore, but rather a symptom of “paranoid schizophrenia”. It’s not clear how the various types of schizophrenia are related or if they are related at all, and there is as of yet no actual cure for any of them.
Personally, I think it’s stupid and irresponsible for a schizophrenic to refuse medication that would help them. The key phrase being “that would help them”. If the medication does not in fact improve their quality of life, I cannot see much justification for forcing it upon them.
*The father of a friend of mine broke his leg after slipping on an ice patch and chose not to go to the hospital for it. He “took it easy” for a month or so, and considered that sufficient. I think it was a pretty stupid decision, but the man is, to my knowledge, not a lunatic so much as a macho type who also hates visiting the doctor. Do you think government agents should have been able to kick in his door and drag him into an emergency room against his will?
Drugs are not perfect. Despite what you may think, modern medicine doesn’t have perfect answers- especially when it comes to psychiatric medicine. What we do have is a lot of measures that help some people but most all of them have some major drawbacks. We don’t even have a good idea how a lot of them actually work- we just noticed somewhere along the way that it seems to help.
For example, electro shock therapy is very effective, but it can also dramatically change a person’s personality- to the point that they “miss” who they used to be- and we don’t have any idea what it actually does to the brain. It works, yeah, but it’s not a cleancut answer like setting a broken bone.
Sometimes our medicines are big fucking hammers. It’s like fixing a broken bone by cutting the arm off. Or making your whole body numb so you can’t feel the broken bone. It’s “doing something” but it’s not really a solution. We arn’t talking about cures here. We don’t have cures.
And then there is the problem of what a “cure” even constitutes when it comes to phsyciatric issues. It’s traditionally defined as being able to hold a steady job, have regular relationships and generally to “function”. There is no denying that this is deeply dependent on the society your living in. Mental disorders are not clear diagnoses. Curing them is not a 1+1=2 kind of thing. It’s more of an interplay of personalities and society and chemistry. But somewhere in there is a human. And that human may not want their brain chemistry altered. And that is their right. It’s their brain. You don’t know what trade-offs they are willing to make, and you don’t have a right to alter the very stuff of who they are.
Mental disorders are a big tragedy. It sucks that people have them, and it sucks more that we don’t have any real easy solutions. But it’s insulting and outright wrong to liken them to broken arms.
No shit. My 1.5 mg of Xanax just about knocks me out. It isn’t so much blocking it out as numbing everything. BUT - it and my other meds lets me function around other people. A cure? No, but it makes life possible.
As a side note, schizophrenia is not incurable. I’ve known many cases of people who, after years of work, have overcome it.
No, it is more like paralysis. It is something you can be born with, or can get through tragedy (PTSD, etc). It affects your ability to be around people, to get around, to live life, to work. It puts a burden on your loved ones as they help carry your weight (and put up with you on your worse days).
I have two friends I met before my schizophrenia really kicked in, one who has been paralyzed from the neck down for life, and one who is blind. The three of us couldn’t work very well alone, but together, we had a great time (the blind chick is also the best pipe packer I’ve ever met). It is a pain in the ass going out, but we manage to do it, and do it almost normally. Boy, did we ever get on the Disabled Students Program’s shitlist. But I learned a lot from them - I learned that anyone can live a normal life. The only time I actually feel psychologically safe is around them, not at the hospitals or anything.
If you refuse treatment? Absolutely. Note the “I may or may nnot be aware of actual events around me” bit. Do you not understand that this makes you dangerous, especially when your condition makes you susceptible to believing you are under imminent threat from people around you? Or do you just not care?