IMPORTANT FACTS

1. Before you finish reading this publication, 20 people� one of whom is perhaps a friend, a family member, or a neighbor �will have been committed to a psychiatric institution and, more often than not, brutally treated.

2. The committal process can keep a person indefinitely in the hospital for years. Upon release, patients may be saddled with mandatory community �treatment� orders.

3. Most commitment laws are based on the concept that a person may be a danger to himself or others if not placed in an institution. However, psychiatrists admit they cannot predict dangerous behavior.

4. The majority of involuntarily committed individuals have fewer rights and less legal protections than a criminal, yet they have not violated any civil or penal code.

5. Michael McCubbin, Ph.D., associate researcher, and David Cohen, Ph.D., professor of social services, both of the University of Montreal, say that the ��right to treatment� is today more often the �right� to receive forced treatment.�

CHAPTER THREE A �Cruel Compassion�

Accompanying the psychiatrists� push for expanded community mental health is their demand for greater powers to involuntarily commit individuals.

Currently in the United States, one person is involuntarily incarcerated in a psychiatric facility every 1 1/4 minutes. In 2002, a study found increasing rates of involuntary commitment in Austria, England, Finland, France, Germany and Sweden, with Germany recording a 70% increase over eight years.

Before you finish reading this publication, 20 more people� perhaps a friend, a family member, or a neighbor�will have been committed and, more often than not, brutally treated.

Psychiatrists disingenuously argue that involuntary commitment in hospitals or the community is an act of kindness, that it is cruel to leave the demented or disturbed in a tormented state. However, such claims are based on the dual premises that: 1) psychiatrists have helpful and workable treatments to begin with, and 2) psychiatrists have some expertise in diagnosing and predicting dangerousness.

Both suppositions are patently false.

As already discussed, psychiatric neuroleptic �treatment� not only creates the sort of violence or mental incompetence that would give cause for involuntary incarceration or coercive community treatment under current laws, it places the patient at greater risk mentally and physically. As a result of enforced community mental health treatment to date, we now have millions of drugged and incapable individuals roaming homeless on the streets.

Psychiatric detainment can become a life sentence. Apart from the fact that the committal process can keep a person indefinitely in the hospital for years, once released, patients may be under mandatory community �treatment� orders.

Robert Whitaker says that in this way, �States are asserting the right to demand that people living in the community take �antipsychotic� drugs, which represents a profound expansion of state control over the mentally ill.�

Most commitment laws are based on the concept that a person may be a danger to himself or others if not placed in an institution. However, an American Psychiatric Association (APA) task force admitted in a 1979 Brief to the U.S. Supreme Court that, �Psychiatric expertise in the prediction of �dangerousness� is not established.�

Terrence Campbell in a 1994 article in the Michigan Bar Journal wrote, �The accuracy with which clinical judgment presents future events is often little better than random chance. The accumulated research literature indicates that errors in predicting dangerousness range from 54% to 94%, averaging about 85%.�

In 2002, Kimio Moriyama, vice president of the Japanese Psychiatrists� Association, expressed psychiatry�s inability to foresee correctly what a person�s future behavior might be: �A patient�s mental disease and criminal tendency are essentially different, and it is impossible for medical science to tell whether someone has a high potential to repeat an offense.�

Another psychiatric ruse is the claim that involuntary commitment protects the person�s �right to treatment.� Quite aside from the fiction of �treatment,� involuntary commitment laws are totalitarian.

According to Professor Szasz, �Whether we admit it or not, we have a choice between caring for others by coercing them and caring for them only with their consent. At the moment, care without coercion�when the ostensible beneficiary�s problem is defined as mental illness�is not an acceptable option� in professional deliberations on mental health policy. �The conventional explanation for shutting out this option is that the mental patient suffers from a brain disease that annuls his capacity for rational cooperation.�

Professor Szasz says this is false. �All history teaches us to beware of benefactors who deprive their beneficiaries of liberty.�

Michael McCubbin, Ph.D., associate researcher, and David Cohen, Ph.D., professor of social services, both of the University of Montreal, say that the ��right to treatment� is today more often the �right� to receive forced treatment.�

Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights guarantees, �Everyone who is deprived of his liberty by arrest or detention shall be entitled to take proceedings by which the lawfulness of his detention shall be decided speedily by a court and his release ordered if the detention is not lawful.� The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights recommends similar protections.

Yet every week, thousands are seized without due process of law as a result of psychiatric involuntary commitment laws. The majority of these citizens have fewer rights and less legal protections than a criminal, yet they have not violated any civil or penal code.

George Hoyer, professor of community medicine at the University of Tromsoe in Norway, wrote, �Seriously mentally disordered patients neither lack insight, nor is their competency impaired.�

Depriving the liberty of a �mentally disordered� person by involuntary incarceration in a psychiatric facility and then forcing �treatment� upon him or her, especially after a person�s explicit refusal to undergo potentially dangerous treatment, violates the most fundamental freedoms that are enjoyed by all other citizens, including those undergoing medical treatment.

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