Involuntary Committment... Notice Any Similarities

[Antigen]

Paul, I don't think you read the essay. It's a good essay. Szatz advocates for voluntary psychotherapy and draws the distinction between brain illness (neurological disease or injury) and behavoral or belief issues, which are not illnesses at all. He also has always advocated for leaveing people the hell alone unless and until they actually commit a crime against a non-consenting other. So no locking people up just for being different, weird, antisocial or whatever; either under the pretense of therapy or not.

"One commentator pointed out that when the mafia commits violence, no
one suggests we bomb Sicily.  Today it seems we are, in a symbolic way, not only bombing "Sicily," but are thinking about bombing "Athens" (Iraq)."

http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2001/cr112901.htm' target='_new'>Ron Paul, 11/29/01 Speech before Congress

[Anonymous]

On 2005-05-13 21:03:00, Paul wrote:

"You got all the facts and current

trends correct.



Thanks for posting from first hand

experience.



The anti-pychiatry crowd will just

dismiss you as an anomoly.



That is sad, obviously.



I appreciate you stating it like it

is, those on the list who are seeking

the truth will appreciate your honesty.



The anti-psychiatrist will just keep

on hurting those that need help ..."

I understand the terrible fear people who are not mentally ill have for being locked up, adjudged mentally ill, and (they think) forced onto psychoactive drugs.

And for a teen placed in a program, forced drugging is a real fear.  For adults, it's paranoia.  You *can* refuse the drugs even if you're loony as a toon and they can't make you take them.

This is why I like the SPECT scanning technology.  It provides powerful objective evidence that, while not conclusive, can give people who are not mentally ill a tool for arguing against an involuntary commitment.  I think anyone being involuntarily committed should be able to demand a SPECT scan.

On the other side of it, there are an awful lot of people out there who believe they aren't mentally ill when they really are.

There are way more non-mentally-ill people petrified of being labeled mentally ill, but among those of us who *do* have mental illnesses, there are many who firmly believe they don't.

Again, a SPECT scan, while not absolutely conclusive, provides some hard evidence that can support or refute what the doctor is saying.

Also, which areas of the brain are abnormal--and in what ways--matter to potential for aggressive, unwarranted violence.  Even someone with a mental illness, armed with a SPECT scan, may be able to successfully make the case that they are not dangerous.

Anybody is *capable* of violence---look at any parent defending her child.  The kicker is whether or not you're prone to irrationally initiating acts of violence yourself.

Personally, I'd allow the patient to decline the offer of a SPECT scan and challenge his/her commitment without it if he/she chose, but allow him/her to insist on and have a right to the scan if he/she wanted one.

But it's really hard to get people who aren't mentally ill to believe that if you scan their brain, their brain really is different from yours.

Which is one reason why those of us who *are* mentally ill are always running into people who think we could "suck it up" and "rise above it" if we "really wanted to."  Or that we could "learn how to compensate for it."

Nothing you say can convince them that the doctors could tell you in advance what my brain would look like--general pattern--if you took me off my meds and scanned me, and what *their* brain would look like if you scanned them, and that the two pictures would be very, very different.

They just don't believe it.

Even not being mentally ill doesn't protect someone from having some irrational fears.

It's rational for kids to fear bad psychology and bad psychiatry being involuntarily foisted on them.  That *is* happening.

When it's non-mentally ill adults fearing it, it's a *genuine* fear, but not a rational one.

Now, if anyone here has grounds to worry about ending up in the hands of bad psychiatry, it would be me---or any of us who are actually mentally ill.  *I* have rational grounds to be concerned that if I ended up in government custody somehow, some goombah might misdiagnose me and *deprive* me of the very necessary meds that keep me sane, and then blame me for whatever I did in an unstable state---or worse, put me in a situation, out of my mind, where I could kill myself or someone else.

It's a lot easier for a pernicious government to find an excuse take someone's meds away, than to force them down someone else's throat.

My meds just make me, about many things, more stable than a whole lot of people whose eccentricities don't rise to the level of actual mental illness.  Not "normal" exactly--there are some effects and damage from my illness that they just don't have treatments for yet, like the executive function problems.

But I don't tend to see conspiracies everywhere and jump at shadows.

Unfortunately, most eccentric people think they're normal.  They don't realize they're missing maybe half a card in their deck.  I don't think government should *do* anything about that, but it does mean that some people's fears about some things aren't real amenable to reason.

Ginger, I'm not talking about you.  With what you went through, you have every reason to be a bit jumpy.  I do think that since the 80's, with the improvements of various meds, it's gotten a whole lot easier to contest an involuntary commitment.  As an adult, even a young one, you could not get court ordered to a facility for a couple of years now.  (Maybe before you were 21 in a few states, but more probably not).  They have to give you your own lawyer, and because of the new meds *anybody* can make a case, by being lucid in the hearing, that someplace that can't stabilize you for release within 3 weeks isn't trying very hard.

You guys have no idea how hard parents of seriously mentally ill and seriously unstable children have to fight to get hospitals and such to *keep* their kids longer than that.  It can take longer to get someone newly diagnosed stable on the right medication because you usually have to try a couple before you get one that fits and isn't giving that patient problems with side effects.

Over on the boards for parents with bipolar kids, it's pretty much a given that after your kid turns 18, if he/she isn't stable, or believe's he/she isn't sick and won't take meds, there's not a blasted thing you can do about it.  The sad bit is that that gets kids who can't survive independently kicked out of their homes because they're dangerous and violent to the parents and the younger children.  Which is partly how new homeless mentally ill happen.

Because of the advances, it's a lot easier for a person who's not seriously mentally ill, or even one who is, to fight an involuntary commitment now.

For one thing, since very, very few real mentally ill folks have to be doped to the gills to be stabilized, if you produce someone for a hearing and they're drooling and have a vacant stare, the people arguing *for* the commitment have some serious 'splainin' to do.  And the judge is far more likely to be very skeptical than credulous.

Improvements in treatments have made it *very* hard to credibly claim that drugging someone to zombiehood is anything but a ploy to limit their ability to contest the commitment.

And if they drug you with stuff to make you act dippy at the hearing, it's easy enough to say so, request your blood be drawn immediately and analyzed by a totally independent lab, and they are soooo busted.  At which point the judge will be pissed and they'll have to produce you *off* meds if you request it--and the judge will *check*.

It's a lot harder than it used to be to lock someone up on a bogus claim of them being nuts.

I'm not saying it can't happen, just that instead of rolling a six-sided die, you're more like rolling a hundred-sided die with maybe five chances in a hundred that, if you contest the commitment and *aren't* dangerously mentally ill, you'll get wrongly committed.

If you're an *adult*.

Involuntary psychiatry for kids really is primitive as hell, and that's why I'm trying to bring the protections up to adult standards.

I think a kid that wants to contest a commitment ought to get a completely independent guardian ad litem, not mom and dad, to represent his case that he *shouldn't* be committed.

But most other average people, them not much interested in the issue but okay to discuss it if the subject comes up, have a case of the vapors if I even suggest it.

Timoclea

[Antigen]

On 2005-05-14 16:12:00, Anonymous wrote:

Ginger, I'm not talking about you. With what you went through, you have every reason to be a bit jumpy.

What, so people who haven't got the benefit of my experience should just relax and enjoy their blissful ignorance? I'm really not jumpy over events that happened to me over 20 years ago. I'm jumpy because, having seen it happen firsthand and looking around seeing how the people who did it to me continue to expand their power and reach, I know very well that it can happen to damned near anybody.

I'm not saying it can't happen, just that instead of rolling a six-sided die, you're more like rolling a hundred-sided die with maybe five chances in a hundred that, if you contest the commitment and *aren't* dangerously mentally ill, you'll get wrongly committed.



If you're an *adult*.

And *if* you know something about how all this works. Most people really don't. If a neighbor gets dragged off the street and declared crazy, most people won't say "That's not right, she's not crazy." Most people will say "Well, who'd a thunk it!" That comes from personal experience too. Every time I run into an old friend from pre-program days, the first thing they want to know is how I'm dealing w/ my drug problem.  :roll:

But we're missing each other on a significant point. You're talking about neurological disease that can be detected by objective lab work. I'll admit, I don't know much about that particular type of lab work. I do know that normal changes in mental state (fear, excitement, euphorea, etc) can also be detected w/ lab work, so I'm not very sure that that's a great way to draw the line.

But when most people talk about "mental illness" they're not talking about a medical condition that can be treated w/ medication. They're talking about behavior or beliefs that are disconcerting or otherwise unacceptable to some others. The "disease" of substance abuse is a big favorite among them others. Or expressing anger or exasperation toward any authority figure. Ok, maybe you do have to be a little touched to actually tell off a cop w/ no sense of humor. But it shouldn't be that way.

If we had had the ability and will to treat away what we now define as mental illness 100 years ago, my book collection would be far less interesting and we probably wouldn't even have any significant pop music industry at all.

I'm all for letting everyone alone, whether they choose to seek psyche treatment and drugs or not. But no one should be held against their will unless and until they infringe on the rights of others in very significant ways.

When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with all other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.
-- John Muir

_________________
Ginger Warbis ~ Antigen
Drug war POW
Seed `71 - `80
Straight, Sarasota
   10/80 - 10/82
Anonymity Anonymous
return undef() if /coercion/i;

[Paul]

Ginger,

You are right, I only scanned it.

I will try to read the whole thing,
although it is difficult for me
to read anti-psychiatry literature.

---

Obviously we are talking about adult
vs children't rights, correct.

---

Adult's have the right to govt. paid
patient advocates to represent them
in involuntary committment cases ...
for free!

Children's, I don't know?
I am an adult mental heatlh advocate.
I am just now getting on some children's
workgroups, and my learning curve has
just begun.

---

FYI: San Diego County 3.3 million. Amount
of Adults in long term state psychiatric
hospital involuntary settings ... 17.

Amount in IMD, Institute for Mental Diseases,
this is a shorter stay, evaluated regularily:
100

Those numbers do not represent the epidemic
promoted by the anti crowd.

---

Another interesting factoid:

How many members of mindfreedom.org ?

David Oak's anti-psychiatry pulpit ...
600 in the whole USA.

How many counties in the US, 720 or so ...

It is rumured that many of the 600 members
of SCI are lurkers, just wondering what
the uninformed anti's are spouting off next.

[nite owl]

California also has a 72 hour hold - but a "crisis team" must make that initial decision. Once institutionalized in a psych hospital they can keep one against their will for another 2 weeks.  This all must be paid for by the person or their family - it is not at the government's expence.  Found this to be true when this happened to my own child.....It's called 72 hour hold - then they have the right to keep them another 2 weeks - but this must be reevaluated daily.  Once they are no longer a threat to themselves or to others they can leave.  

Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits.
--Dan Barker, author and former evangelist

[Timoclea]

Ginger, I only favor involuntary commitment if the person is *actively, immediately* dangerous to self or others.

But I do support continuing outpatient commitment for psychotic people with a history of being actively, immediately dangerous to others---what outpatient commitment is, for anyone who doesn't know, is ordering a patient to take his meds as a condition of staying out of the hospital.

If they took me off my meds and did a SPECT scan on my brain, patches of it all over the top left and top right, all over the place, would be bright red among the blue lines (on the black background for that kind of picture), with some patchiness around the front.  The red is from abnormally high blood flow to certain areas of the brain.  Even on my meds, if they scanned me, the picture would be patchy, particularly on the upper left temporal lobe in the language area.  It's why I write so much.  I have hypergraphia and no meds they've got even touch it---but I can get paid for it, too, so it's not so bad. :smile:

Maybe if you have bad PMS when you were PMSing you'd have some red patchiness, but not a patch on mine.

Just about everyone even remotely normal has a scan almost entirely of blue lines with two little red eggs down in the forward center.

They've got another kind of picture the scan puts out where your brain looks like a fluffy cloud.  ADHD?  There's little swiss cheese holes in the fluffy cloud picture in your frontal lobe when you're trying to concentrate.

Schizophrenic or got general paresis(iirc)?  Swiss cheese holes all over your brain.

Had brain damage from an injury?  Most likely a swiss cheese hole or two where you got injured in the fluffy cloud picture, but maybe you've got the high blood flow for an oddly-located red patch or few.

The unusual red patches go around your brain kind of like a ring, or maybe you've got big red blotches down low in the back in your limbic system?  Then chances are much higher that you have a problem with violence.

People shouldn't be imprisoned for their beliefs unless their belief is that they ought to or are justified in killing other people and they demonstrate a high willingness to act on those beliefs---like getting convicted of conspiracy to commit murder.  Even then, that qualifies you for a jail cell, IMO, not a mental hospital.

People like me, with serious mental illnesses that are clearly biological---need to be left the hell alone unless we become immediately and actively dangerous to self or others.  And the "self" bit is more a concession to the rest of society's norms than a personal belief.

People whose serious mental illness or serious brain damage makes them violent and actively dangerous to others really need to be quarantined in a mental hospital while they're dangerous so they won't hurt anybody; but with medications, those of us who have that happen to us can become not dangerous, get released, and live normal lives.

What it comes down to is none of the rest of you have to worry about someday, if someone *doesn't* commit you and needs to, maybe being so out of your head that you murder somebody.

Thank whatever you hold sacred that you *don't* have to worry about that personally.

Just about every mentally ill person I know would fall down on their knees and beg their family that if someday they got sick enough to maybe kill someone, and didn't know it, to be committed and stabilized so that that didn't happen and they didn't have to live with the realization that they had done horrible things when their mind finally cleared again.

Seeing how easy it is for seriously mentally ill adults to avoid treatment if we don't want it, I just have real trouble believing that non mentally ill adults can't *also* avoid it.

Timoclea

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
--Thomas Paine, American revolutionary

[Antigen]

Yes, Tim, that all makes perfect sense if we're only talking about relatively sane people in charge who only want to help people who are really in need of help.

But the more commonly accepted reality is that we're dealing w/ people in power who view the first toke of a joint or even just attempted escape from the school system as tantamount to suicide and doing anything like that in the company of friends as tantamount to attempted murder.

History gives us a kind of chart, and we dare not surrender even a small rushlight in the darkness. The hasty reformer who does not remember the past will find himself condemned to repeat it.
--John Buchan

_________________
Ginger Warbis ~ Antigen
Drug war POW
Seed `71 - `80
Straight, Sarasota
   10/80 - 10/82
Anonymity Anonymous
return undef() if /coercion/i;

[Antigen]

Paul, I think psychiatry vs antipsychiatry is very much a straw man. What's happening is that various people operating from various agendas are using serious mental problems as a way to market their ideas about how to force everyone to conform to a very narrow, often a very neurotic, world view.

You say you need meds and a good shrink, I believe you. I have a brother who did almost as well on cannabis as he did on Xanex. I don't dismiss out of hand that some people are better off on some meds. Not at all.

But my dear brother choose cannabis over xanex because he was afraid of getting tagged w/ a psyche dx, which seems to be a whole other ordeal in Florida from what you describe in Cali. Then his kid hit gradeschool (DARE age) and he tossed out the bongs and trays and papers and such in trade for good old, legal beer (again!) and hit the skids.

We're doing something very, very wrong here! Patients who need and want treatment are unwittingly advocating for policies that are routinely used to put down various social and political activity that bears no resemblance to what you describe as mental illness.

First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0826400035/circlofmiamithem' target='_new'> Gandhi

[Deborah]

***Quoting anti-psychiatry dogma based
on emotion, not fact, influences
those that are not sure what treatment
to seek.

That hasn't been my experience. My batting average for 'influencing' people's decisions about psychiatric or program fraud is very low. One parent ignored my warnings and her son died at a wilderness program. Another parent disregarded my warnings about the military academy my son was heinously abused in (and sued) and I just heard they are pulling thier child.
I tend to believe that people can make their own decisions. I share what I know. What they choose is their business and I don't loose any sleep over it.

***Many patients go through the anti-pychiatry
phase of their quest for health. If they
are lucky and are not in jail or dead
then the next phase is to seek treatment
with evidence based practices.

Um huh, where have we heard 'deadorinjail' before?

***Anti-psychiatry is far from an evidence
based practice.

Paul, this is your opinion. There is much you don't know, and probably don't care to know. Debating this issue is about as useful as debating religion. We could say that you're a fundamentalist and I'm an atheist/agnostic.
Word of god being synonymous with 'Evidence based'. Pooey.

[Paul]

Ginger,

Sorry to hear about your brother.

Could you expand on this statement
a little bit:

We're doing something very, very wrong here! Patients who need and want treatment are unwittingly advocating for policies that are routinely used to put down various social and political activity that bears no resemblance to what you describe as mental illness.

Thanks ...

[Paul]

Remember that I am talking about the adult
and older adult system of care.

If there are specific problems to children's
civil rights due to being under 18, then I am
not familiar with these issues.

Dead or in Jail, for adults I should have included
broke, homeless, isolating, in trouble with the law,
suicides and/or jail. Not true? Then who are these
folks in jail? Who are the 30% of homeless with mental illness. Did you watch the PBS show?

'Evidence based'. Pooey.
Right, and some members of the OJ jury stated
that there was too much evidence, so they voted
innocent.

[Paul]

Every county in the US has a local Mental Health Board, they can also be called local Mental Health Advisory Board, or a local Mental Health Commission.

If you are interested, check one out.

[Paul]

Perhaps this is where the problem
lies in this discussion.

I am talking about diagnosable
mental illness. Where psychotherapy,
medications, ECT and various programs
will help in recovery ... to hopefully
leave the mental health system, or
have a maintenance only protocol.

The list is talking mostly about behavioral
issues where people are getting into trouble.

Trouble does not necessarily fit a mental
"hold" for a psychiatric assessment. If
the doctor at the facility determines that
it is drugs, or criminal not a potential
mental illness then a psychiatric hold
will not occur.

Then it is up to the police to process the
individual through the criminal system,
or not. Usually at this point the police
cannot make this decision and the courts
are the next decision making body.

It does not matter who makes the call on
a potential psychiatric hold, called a
5150, in California. If the psychiatrist
does not agree, no hold will be started.

After 72 hours, there has to be a Reese
hearing, and a judge will hear the evidence
if the facility is recommending an additional
14 day evaluation hold. The state will pay
for representation via the local Patient
Advocate program.

In California not every hospital is approved
for these holds. The must be an LPS hospital
and follow strict guidelines.

All the guidelines are set up to protect
the patient from abuse. The LPS law was
passed about 40+ years ago as part of
the de-institutionalization of the mentally
ill from large state hospitals to communities.

The community mental health programs where
mandated, but never adequately funded. This
is the current situation today.

---

The way that society has resolved the involuntary
treatment dilema is to let the courts handle the
crimal aspect of an indivuals behavior, regardless
of mental illness, or behavioral choices.

In California the mentally ill comprise 30,000 inmates of 160,000 in jails and prisons.

---

When someone is symptomatic and the laws prevent
them getting treatment the saying is:
"dying with their rights on" and if jailed,
"sitting in jail wondering where their rights where"

---

Again, I am talking about mental illness, not
behavioral choices.

---

Please watch the PBS special, I don't think there
is any doubt that mental illness is real, regardless of Szasz and his small band of niche
anti-psychiatry celebrities.

[Deborah]

Paul,
I believe that the problem with homelessness goes much deeper than 'mental illness'.
Had a professor once who told the class, mostly young impressionable students, that poor/homeless would benefit from anitdepressants, implying that 'mental illness' was the source of their inability to provide for themselves.
Give me an f-in break.
Yep, let's drug em up. If they're lucky and the drugs work as intended, perhaps they will no longer feel distressed about economic injustices, lack of pro-life policies, lack of a living wage, and growing reduction of social services/welfare.
 
Tax payers will pay for their drugs (that's you and me bud) when the poor would probably be 'happier' with $250 rather than a rx for Prozac. I'm sure some are smart enough to sell them for cash in order to acquire the basic necessities they really need.
Just another way to subvert our tax dollars and ignore the real needs of the poor/homeless.

http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/0603/24a.php
The escalating cost of healthcare is in large measure due to the spiraling expenditure on drugs--many of which are misprescribed. The Boston Globe reports about one Medicaid patient who is prescribed 18 medications at a cost of roughly $16,000 a year-- "all at the expense of the financially struggling Massachusetts Medicaid program."
[$16,000 !!! My opinion is that it would be more altruistic to give the woman 16K a year to live on, rather than putting it into the pockets of big pharma.]

The woman (who was alcoholic) is a pharmaceutical company's dream consumer. Thanks to psychiatrists' poly-pharmacy prescribing practices she is taking multiple costly drugs of the same class. Such prescribing practices are more likely to generate drug-induced new pathologies than to cure the condition for which they are prescribed. What some would call malpractice, is an incredibly lucrative marketing strategy.

According to Massachusetts Medicaid, the 10 most prescribed drugs under the Medicaid program are:

1. Zyprexa (antipsychotic) costs Massachusetts taxpayers $4.2 million,
2. Protonix (heartburn) costs $3.6 million
3. Risperdal (antipsychotic) costs $3.1 million
4. Lipitor (anti-cholesterol) costs $2.8 million
5. Seroquel (antipsychotic) costs $2.8 million
6. Neurontin (neuropathic pain...) $2 mill
7. Depakote (antidepressant) $1.7 million
8. OxyContin (narcotic) $1.6 million
9. Zoloft (antidepressant)$1.5 million
10. Paxil (antidepressant) $1.2 million

7 of the 10 drugs are expensive psychiatric drugs that are eating up the Medicaid budget. The Boston Globe reports that about 40,000 patients in the Massachusetts Medicaid program take eight or more medications. "Thousands of other patients take five or more psychiatric drugs, more than one newer antidepressant, or more than one newer antipsychotic."

Furthermore, "For patients on eight or more drugs or five or more psychiatric drugs, Medicaid officials will try to educate doctors about why this could be a health problem."

One must wonder about the professional competence of State licensed psychiatrists who prescribe powerful, mind altering drugs, yet are ignorant about these drugs' potential to cause patients harm.

[Deborah]

***Please watch the PBS special, I don't think there is any doubt that mental illness is real, regardless of Szasz and his small band of niche
anti-psychiatry celebrities.

You just keep missing the point and arrogantly misrepresenting anti-psychs. There isn't one anti-psych person who doesn't believe that some people have problems with living. That perhaps, through their life some neural pathways were established that result in anti-social behavior, that they lack skills/education necessary to economically provide for them selves or families, etc. etc. etc.

Psychiatric treatment and drugs is not the end all. Most times the person's real needs go unmet while their emotions are suppresed with mind numbing drugs that ARE dangerous, and at the very least damage major organs and at the very worst, can cause worse side-effect, including suicide/homicide. Now, that's hopeful. Not.