The Evil of Involuntary Commitment
Posted: Fri Oct 30, 2015 3:24 pm
I have a personal horror story to reveal to you. Eleven years ago, I was having regular psychiatry sessions. During one session, I mentioned to my therapist that I sometimes fantasized about suicide. At this point she freaked out and said that she needed to "take action." She said that she was calling the police and was having me taken to a hospital. At the time, I knew very little about the field of psychiatry, so I had no idea what was going on. I didn't want to comply with this but the therapist said I had no choice. Eventually the police came and took me to a facility where I essentially became a prisoner. I was put in a ward designated for suicidals and alcoholics and I was held behind electronically locked doors and forced to take regular psychiatric sessions with doctors I had never met before. I pleaded with the employees to let me out but they just ignored me. I was forced to live with a bunch of complete strangers; I shared a room with an alcoholic who had a liver problem and coughed in his sleep constantly – I got maybe four hours of sleep each night because of this. I had to take group sessions with the other patients and had to watch various video presentations about both depression and alcoholism and drug abuse. I was forced to take regular doses of Paxil each day; I had to stand in front of a nurse and let her watch me swallow the pill. However, since I don't put faith in psychiatric drugs, I merely put the pills under my tongue and pretended to swallow them, and later I spat the pills out and flushed them down the toilet. After five nightmarish days, I was finally allowed to leave that hellhole.
After leaving, I was quite confused as to what had just happened. After talking to the psychiatrist who had called the police on me and after doing some research of my own, I realized that what had happened to me was a procedure common to psychiatry known as "involuntary commitment." Apparently if a therapist sees the patient as a danger to himself, he has the power to forcibly commit the patient to a hospital against the patient's will.
I am writing this post because I think that what was done to me was an egregious evil, an unconstitutional act, and a violation of my civil rights. As of right now I have no plans to commit suicide, but even if I did the government has no right to tell me I can't do it. Whether or not a person has a right to kill himself is not a legal issue but a philosophical one. There is a basic philosophical premise underneath involuntary commitment, which is that citizens have no right to kill themselves; but the government has no business making philosophical judgments on behalf of citizens. The government simply has no right to interfere in such a matter; this is a matter of personal choice, a personal right. The right to live and the right to die are just opposite sides of the same coin. They both constitute two aspects of the whole that is the most basic right of a human being. It is unethical for the government to say that a person has no right to kill himself; it makes no more sense than for the government to say a person has no right to live.
Another problem I have with involuntary commitment is that it gives WAY too much power to psychiatrists. They already have a good deal of power, for example they apparently can invent new diseases and disorders as they see fit, they impose certain drugs on society based on those invented diseases, and they also can decide the fates of defendants in court by determining their psychological fitness. Allowing them to make people do things they don't want to do is just taking things too far.
Psychiatrists are classified as "doctors," but what other kind of doctor has the kind of power that psychiatrists have? Take this example. Say there is an oncologist who has a patient he has just diagnosed with cancer. He recommends chemotherapy. But say the patient says no; she doesn't want the chemotherapy. There is no way that the oncologist can force the patient to take chemotherapy, even if he is absolutely certain that the patient will die very soon if she doesn't get it, and he is certain the chemotherapy will prolong her life for many years. The choice of the cancer patient to refuse chemotherapy and the choice of the psychiatric patient to pursue suicide are effectively not that much different. So a doctor that has a genuine ability to save lives can not force a particular treatment upon his patients against their will, but for some mysterious reason psychiatrists have been given this power. They have been given power by the government to impose their own treatment on their patients against their will. Is this right? Does this make sense? I would say that psychiatrists should have even less power over their patients than other doctors, since their diagnoses are so much more subjective and un-scientific compared with those of other doctors. In my opinion, the only doctor that should be able to impose a treatment on his patients without their consent is a veterinarian.
Honestly, I have very little respect for the field of psychiatry in general. I don't know of any medical field in which the "doctor" gets paid so much for so little work. All they do is just sit there and listen, occasionally give some stupid advice, and then prescribe you whatever pharmaceutical drug they are told by the powers that be to prescribe. The field is very subjective, nonscientific and questionable. During slavery days in the US, some psychiatrists invented a particular mental illness called "drapetomania," which caused some slaves to have the strange urge to run away from captivity. In the mid 1900s, they determined that homosexuality was a mental illness and imposed certain treatments for it including electric shock therapy. What psychiatrists are doing today is no better than these other questionable procedures; locking people away for the mere mention of suicide is just as ridiculous.
Psychiatry wants to solve every psychological problem with science: first it was electroshock therapy, then lobotomies, now its pharmaceutical drugs. But the fact is that psychological problems are caused by complex mental, social, and environmental factors which cannot necessarily be reduced to distinct scientific terms. Society sees depression and suicidal thoughts as diseases, in the same sense that asthma or tuberculosis are diseases, and thus can be treated as such. But I disagree. Suicidal intention is not the problem; it is the solution. Psychiatrists should be targeting the problems that lead one to that particular solution rather than targeting the solution itself. Incarcerating and medicating someone for a solution is stupid and wrong. It accomplishes nothing. Personally, I don't think that involuntary commitment is an effective procedure for turning people away from suicide, and even if it were I still think it's wrong because the decision to commit suicide is a personal and philosophical matter and should not itself be illegal.
Involuntary commitment is unjust and a violation of civil rights. It is truly scary to know that the government can just scoop you up and incarcerate you even when you've done nothing wrong and have committed no crime, just because you said something unpopular. This is why we have laws; laws don't exist to protect the popular opinions but to protect the unpopular ones. This procedure should frighten everyone. It may seem OK to some, but at the very least it is a crack in the door to further violations of people's rights to think and live as they please. What other rights will they take away next? What other actions can we be incarcerated for next? What other opinions will they shut down next?
What are your feelings about involuntary commitment? What should/can we do to put a stop to this evil?
After leaving, I was quite confused as to what had just happened. After talking to the psychiatrist who had called the police on me and after doing some research of my own, I realized that what had happened to me was a procedure common to psychiatry known as "involuntary commitment." Apparently if a therapist sees the patient as a danger to himself, he has the power to forcibly commit the patient to a hospital against the patient's will.
I am writing this post because I think that what was done to me was an egregious evil, an unconstitutional act, and a violation of my civil rights. As of right now I have no plans to commit suicide, but even if I did the government has no right to tell me I can't do it. Whether or not a person has a right to kill himself is not a legal issue but a philosophical one. There is a basic philosophical premise underneath involuntary commitment, which is that citizens have no right to kill themselves; but the government has no business making philosophical judgments on behalf of citizens. The government simply has no right to interfere in such a matter; this is a matter of personal choice, a personal right. The right to live and the right to die are just opposite sides of the same coin. They both constitute two aspects of the whole that is the most basic right of a human being. It is unethical for the government to say that a person has no right to kill himself; it makes no more sense than for the government to say a person has no right to live.
Another problem I have with involuntary commitment is that it gives WAY too much power to psychiatrists. They already have a good deal of power, for example they apparently can invent new diseases and disorders as they see fit, they impose certain drugs on society based on those invented diseases, and they also can decide the fates of defendants in court by determining their psychological fitness. Allowing them to make people do things they don't want to do is just taking things too far.
Psychiatrists are classified as "doctors," but what other kind of doctor has the kind of power that psychiatrists have? Take this example. Say there is an oncologist who has a patient he has just diagnosed with cancer. He recommends chemotherapy. But say the patient says no; she doesn't want the chemotherapy. There is no way that the oncologist can force the patient to take chemotherapy, even if he is absolutely certain that the patient will die very soon if she doesn't get it, and he is certain the chemotherapy will prolong her life for many years. The choice of the cancer patient to refuse chemotherapy and the choice of the psychiatric patient to pursue suicide are effectively not that much different. So a doctor that has a genuine ability to save lives can not force a particular treatment upon his patients against their will, but for some mysterious reason psychiatrists have been given this power. They have been given power by the government to impose their own treatment on their patients against their will. Is this right? Does this make sense? I would say that psychiatrists should have even less power over their patients than other doctors, since their diagnoses are so much more subjective and un-scientific compared with those of other doctors. In my opinion, the only doctor that should be able to impose a treatment on his patients without their consent is a veterinarian.
Honestly, I have very little respect for the field of psychiatry in general. I don't know of any medical field in which the "doctor" gets paid so much for so little work. All they do is just sit there and listen, occasionally give some stupid advice, and then prescribe you whatever pharmaceutical drug they are told by the powers that be to prescribe. The field is very subjective, nonscientific and questionable. During slavery days in the US, some psychiatrists invented a particular mental illness called "drapetomania," which caused some slaves to have the strange urge to run away from captivity. In the mid 1900s, they determined that homosexuality was a mental illness and imposed certain treatments for it including electric shock therapy. What psychiatrists are doing today is no better than these other questionable procedures; locking people away for the mere mention of suicide is just as ridiculous.
Psychiatry wants to solve every psychological problem with science: first it was electroshock therapy, then lobotomies, now its pharmaceutical drugs. But the fact is that psychological problems are caused by complex mental, social, and environmental factors which cannot necessarily be reduced to distinct scientific terms. Society sees depression and suicidal thoughts as diseases, in the same sense that asthma or tuberculosis are diseases, and thus can be treated as such. But I disagree. Suicidal intention is not the problem; it is the solution. Psychiatrists should be targeting the problems that lead one to that particular solution rather than targeting the solution itself. Incarcerating and medicating someone for a solution is stupid and wrong. It accomplishes nothing. Personally, I don't think that involuntary commitment is an effective procedure for turning people away from suicide, and even if it were I still think it's wrong because the decision to commit suicide is a personal and philosophical matter and should not itself be illegal.
Involuntary commitment is unjust and a violation of civil rights. It is truly scary to know that the government can just scoop you up and incarcerate you even when you've done nothing wrong and have committed no crime, just because you said something unpopular. This is why we have laws; laws don't exist to protect the popular opinions but to protect the unpopular ones. This procedure should frighten everyone. It may seem OK to some, but at the very least it is a crack in the door to further violations of people's rights to think and live as they please. What other rights will they take away next? What other actions can we be incarcerated for next? What other opinions will they shut down next?
What are your feelings about involuntary commitment? What should/can we do to put a stop to this evil?