Mentally Ill - Mandatory Treatment!?

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My mother is sometimes severely depressed and if she hadn't been forced to stay in the mental hospital during those times, perhaps she wouldn't still be alive. Both she and I are quite happy about that, and agree that the forced hospitalisation was a good thing.

However, with the attitude of some of the nurses there (goal for some is to have quiet patients, not to help them), and the potential for abuse by people who want someone out of the way, forcing people to stay in mental hospitals is a really scary thing. There is no defined limit on how long someone will stay, and you completely depend on the people working there to give you back your freedom. Furthermore the people who are supposed to help you are biased against you because hey, you're mentally ill and therefore your opinion is invalid and your testimonies false.

So it's both a good thing and very scary because of the (potential) abuse.

Read what Tomas Szaz had to say about this subject.

ruveyn

As someone that has been an inpatient involuntarily I can't support things like that. To make matters worse I was never even diagnosed with anything. I was only in there as punishment for skipping a lot of school and being weird.

The people who run mandatory schools naturally regard truancy as a mental aberration.

ruveyn

Just looked very briefly at the wikipedia page about him but he seems to have some very interesting points. I didn't know him, so thanks for posting his name, I'll have something to read when I get bored.

Would a law like this have helped Adam Lanza?

Sylkat

you can't treat mental illness if the mentally ill guy is already dead

No way man. I've had expierainces with medication and I can tell you the side effects arent worth it, I'd rather be completely insane. I'm completely afraid of people so If I ever have another Episode like that, I'll just kill myself

How about have medical treatment available to the mentally ill instead of having to spam a word war with the insurance industry to fund care?

What is mentally ill? Unlike physical diseases so called "mental illnesses" are not clearly defined or established by objective means. And "mental illness" can be readily politicized. In the late and unlamented Soviet Union, opposition to the government was often characterized as a form of insanity. I the U.S. the liberal psychiatrists could easily define being a conservative Republican as a form of "mental illness".

ruveyn

we aren't as bad as the soviet system, yet

The mentally ill are a minority group that's easy to blame (that's including people with ASDs; disorder and illness are just semantics), because mental illness still has stigma attached to it due to fear mongering and blame shifting (it's not guns, it's mental! It's not evil, it's insane! So on and so forth).

The mentally ill are more likely to be victims of crime than the normal population, and being mentally ill makes someone unlikely to commit violent crime (5% of violent crimes are by the mentally ill. That would mean it's less likely).