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IMPORTANT
FACTS
1. Despite more
than $6 billion (4.89 billion) in taxpayer money spent on psychiatric
research, Rex Cowdry, Director of the U.S. National Institute of Mental
Health, said, �We do not know the causes [of mental illness]. We don�t
have the methods of �curing� these illnesses yet.�
2. In 2002, the
European Commission found that, despite reforms, involuntary commitment
has increased and many patients remain inadequately informed about their
rights.
3. Community Mental
Health programs have been an expensive and colossal failure, creating
homelessness, drug addiction, crime and unemployment all over the world.
4. Mental health
courts assert that criminal behavior is caused by a psychiatric problem
and that treatment will stop the behavior. There is no evidence to support
this.
CHAPTER
THREE: Coercive �Care� in Psychiatry
While proponents of
commitment and enforced psychiatric treatment argue they are protecting
the person�s �right to treatment,� a strong opposition points out that because
of their far-reaching powers, involuntary commitment laws�including forcing
�treatment� onto people in the community�are totalitarian.
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.�
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
to the degree previously believed.�
Robert Hayes, formerly
of the Australian Law Reform Commission, stated, �The fact [is] that mental
illness is rarely defined, even in psychiatric textbooks, that faith in psychiatry
is not always borne out by results � and that without � a real prospect of useful
curative treatment, commitment to a hospital may be oppressive.�
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 APA task force admitted in a 1979 Amicus
Curiae Brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, �Psychiatric expertise in the prediction
of �dangerousness� is not established.�
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 essen- tially different,
and it is impossible for medical science to tell whether someone has a high
potential to repeat an offense,� he said. Another expert stated, �When it comes
to predicting violence, our crystal balls are terribly cloudy.�
Individuals
are sometimes forced to pay for a legal defense against treatment
that they do not want and against incarceration that consumes
their insurance coverage. This occurs in the United States, Austria,
Belgium, France, Germany, Luxemburg and the Netherlands. This
is comparable to being kidnapped and imprisoned, only to be ordered
later by the court to pay the kidnapper for room and board.
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