(July 16, 2014 at 3:54 pm)Faith No More Wrote: Spend several weeks in a mental institution, and then tell me how ludicrous the "non-compliance" label is. Sure, the whole thing is highly subjective, but you have to understand that there are many, many severely mentally ill people that refuse to take their medication or participate in treatment. One of the issues with mental illness is it can make your mind unable to understand that you are ill, and it convinces you that you are sane.
You're approaching this whole issue from your own rational perspective instead of trying to understand that mental illness and its treatment require otherwise seemingly malicious actions. And yes, that does become a problem when subjectivity is involved, and there needs to be oversight. But to deny mental health officials the right to go against a patient's wishes would effectively neuter their ability to administer treatment.
Yeah, sometimes it's a smart move to implement coercive measures against severely mentally ill people, so I'm not completely against it.
Mental health is a vastly more important issue than personal freedom in such circumstances. However, the unfortunate thing about it is that this principle has also opened the doors for mental institutes to cause undeserved suffering to many patients whose illnesses are not severe enough. They get mislabelled and overdiagnosed (refer to post # 56) and then have to spend weeks in a hospital without having anything seriously wrong with them. Then many of them start to experience disastrous side effects from the medications which leaves them in a worse state than before.
Besides, I don't think there is strong evidence that patients who are compelled to receive treatment always do better in the long run, nor that the antipsychotic drugs are always beneficial. Some people get better, some people get worse, and some people stay the same. There's no guarantee what's going to happen to them in the future.
And yes, there are people with mental illnesses who are unable to understand that they have an illness. But on the other hand, there are also people who have been convinced that they have a mental illness even though it is actually something pretty normal. So, whose judgements are you going to rely on? Who should you trust the most? Quite frankly, I'd rather go with my own judgements, not what someone else thinks about me after a 15-minutes meeting.
Regarding the need for oversight, I don't see any good way to do that in psychiatry because, as you acknowledged also, the diagnosing of mental illness is highly subjective. Most of the time there is no scientific measurement, blood test, X-ray evidence, nor anything like that in psychiatry to verify whether or not what you've been told about your mental health is true. It's simply whatever the psychiatrist says. If he says that you have a mental illness and that you need treatment, then that is it. How can anyone else put to rights pronouncements that are so subjective?
So, basically, the whole issue I think boils down to a matter of trust. But unfortunately, history has repeatedly demonstrated that very often the trust gets betrayed and abused. The ubiquitous "Doctors know what's best for you" paradigm is often used as a smokescreen for selling drugs and doing evil things to patients without their knowledge. Horrific atrocities, abuses, and human rights violations are still being committed in secret by the "saviors" of mental illness. One of the many examples is the use of covert medication:
The Noncompliant Patient in Psychiatry: The Case For and Against Covert/Surreptitious Medication
And that's just the tip of the iceberg, of course.
