My ethics are those taught in every medical and nursing school in the UK. I used to teach it to nurses.
It is part of the codes of professional conduct followed by every nurse and doctor in the country. The Hippocratic oath has been replaced by GMC and NMC codes of conduct which ban treatment against the consent of a competent person.
You are entitled to your opinion (however humble) but it is at variance with how medicine is practiced in the UK.
You are free to campaign to change such codes of conduct. Best of luck in swimming against the tide.
I do not for one moment believe that you are taught to let the mentally ill kill themselves unless a psychiatrist has deemed them too ill. That certainly wasn’t the case 15 years ago when I was in a psychiatric ward, and it is contrary to what has happened to people I know. For which I am very thankful.
I see you’re ignoring the question, though. How many mentally ill people have you watched die when you could have saved their life, due to your monstrous “ethics”? And how can you possibly attempt to defend doing so when someone who is only here because people (correctly) ignored those “ethics” says how thankful they are for it?
The idea of a nurse leaving a suicidal patient to die because they are “not ill enough” is horrific. It suggests a terrifying lack of compassion, and I’m just glad that I’ve never encountered a medical professional so callous on either a personal or professional basis.
What I have said is that if someone is assessed as suicidal but NOT mentally ill, they will not be admitted to hospital voluntarily or compulsorily.
They may be offered support but allowed to remain free to self harm if they wish.
If someone has been admitted to a psychiatric facility they will be assumed to be mentally ill. If not desirable but determined to kill themselves, there is no power to stop them leaving the unit. Should they self harm as inpatients they would be assumed to be either incompetent or mentally ill unless diagnosed otherwise.
Any treatment enforced on competent resisting people would be assault.
Please in future address what I wrote, not what you imagine you read.
Suggests that 10% of completed suicides are by persons with no mental health problems.
Of the other 90% it is difficult to determine whether the mental health problems are the direct cause of the suicidal ideation. For instance a diagnosis of alcoholism does not mean that that person’s suicidal ideation was caused by that illness. Certainly people with treatable clinical depression (not normative sadness) should be offered treatment for that illness and people with psychotic command voices urging suicide should also be offered treatment.
But even people with depression or psychosis can have non-illness-related suicidal ideation which is not caused by their illness in the same way that someone suffering from terminal cancer may choose suicide without the cancer being the ‘cause’ of it, merely a contributing factor.
If a person is admitted to an A&E/ER following a suicide attempt and they are assessed as competent and not mentally ill, they will not be forced to accept treatment against their will.
Suicide attempts are certainly related to mental health states, but not all suicide attempts are caused by or diagnostic of mental disorder.
Ah, yes, the old “I have frustrated you with nonsense and fallacious arguments to the point where you’re no longer interested in carrying on this conversation, therefore I WIN” gambit.
The favorite of creationists, anti-vaxers, and Truthers the world over.
Only if he had not been diagnosed with a mental illness or thought to have a lack of capacity.
Suicidal intent and mental illness/incapacity are not coterminous.
Most threatened suicides would qualify for a mental health assessment, but some of those will find that the person was not mentally ill and possessed capacity, and therefore would not be prevented from attempting suicide.
People who maintain that suicidal intent is necessarily a pointer to causation by mental illness, or a sign of impaired capacity are making a statement at variance with one of the main tenets of medicine-respecting personal autonomy.
Okay, let’s move past this point of contention. Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that prisoners do have a right to carry out hunger strikes and prison authorities do not have the power to force feed these prisoners.
What should the response then be to a hunger strike? We can assume that the prisoner is asking for something that he would not normally be granted. If it was something he would normally be allowed, he would presumably have already received it. So should the government grant extraordinary requests because they’re backed up by a hunger strike? Or should the government just follow its existing policies and not change anything in response to the hunger strike?
Pjen, you live in a country where hunger strikes are allowed. How does the government respond to them?
It is quite widely used in geography, and taxonomy and other sorting methods. It is common in diagnosis of syndromes which delay overlapping baskets of symptoms.
In the rest of the western world prisoners are assessed for any causative mental illness and for capacity. Then they are offered food and water regularly, but not forced to take it and are informed about the progress of their starvation/dehydration. They are offered ameliorative medicine and other therapy for pain and discomfort and allowed to die peacefully and quietly if they choose to do so.
Once this method was chosen it ceased to be a popular means of resisting imprisonment. It seems that the main political gain is the discomfiture of the State rather than the death itself; once that gain is removed the whole act loses its potency. Force feeding creates martyrs.
Once again, I cannot provide a cite for a negative. If force feeding of competent sane individuals is banned in most of the civilised world, that is never going to appear in the papers or laws.
There is no reference in the first ten pages of Google searches for such force feeding anywhere but in the USA.
If you believe other jurisdictions do force feed the sane competent, it should be no problem to provide evidence for such occurrences.
I could suggest that you look at the recent Mental Health Review Tribunal Appeal finding in the UK where Ian Brady, a notorious child killer who wishes to starve himself to death in hospital has been denied that right because be is considered to be both mentally disordered and lacking competence. He wishes to move back to prison by overturning his mental disorder diagnosis and competence finding as then he would be allowed to starve himself: