"Court reviews usually are heavily weighted toward the hospital staff, with the patient input during such hearings minimal. In Kansas v. Hendricks, the U.S. Supreme Court found that civil commitment is constitutional regardless of whether any treatment is provided.[35]"
A circuit court judge has dismissed the government’s case against Brandon Raub and ordered that the Marine veteran, detained over anti-government Facebook posts, be released from a state psychiatric hospital because authorities had no grounds to detain him
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Anonymous2015-01-13 13:28
It’s not just the psychiatrist, it’s the state legislatures and federal courts that ENABLE them, by not only 1) handing individuals over to the mercy of such quacks, removing all constitutional protections from citizens declared “mentally ill,” and 2) the federal courts, which remove all constitutional RECOURSE from the victims of shrinks who involuntarily commit people at the drop of a hat; essentially they say that the quacks are “private actors” and therefore cannot be held liable for breaching the Constitution. Thus, the People are caught in a “shell-game by proxy” by which the state escapes constitutional liability by assigning state power to NON-state entities, which are likewise thereby immune by virtue of BEING non-state entities. But this is all ok, because the victims are labeled “crazy.”
psychiatrists Jeffrey Geller and Sally Satel ... argue that schools and businesses should be legally required to report potentially dangerous employees or students to “the medical director of the appropriate public health jurisdiction” for analysis, and — if necessary — “involuntary commitment.”
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Anonymous2015-01-13 14:18
“we needed to go to a hospital so that a real doctor could ask the questions.”
Don't sell yourself short, Mr. Counselor.
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Anonymous2015-01-13 14:28
The date is October, 1963 and it was the last law that President Kennedy signed before he too was, ironically, assassinated by the mentally-ill-on-the-loose, Lee Harvey Oswald. By 1965, this law had its full effect and began the mass exodus of the mentally ill out of the mental hospitals. It also meant that new people needing commitment had no place to go. Many of these were young, as is Loughner, and were the real core of the "Hippy" lifestyle. This was the cause and beginning of the classic "60's" as these mentally ill people, now on their own, began to self medicate with whatever they could get their hands on. And there were always people more than willing to supply their needs and wants.
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Anonymous2015-01-13 14:38
What you have to remember is that they really believe that the patients are suffering from some kind of biological illness and need medication in order to be “well”. As ridiculous as these ideas may sound, they really believe this, and have often had many years of training to back this up. Obviously the more training they’ve had the more they believe this stuff. For example a fairly new student nurse may still see the patients as distressed human beings who need somebody to listen to them non-judgementally and offer emotional support – but a consultant psychiatrist will be certain that the patients are “unwell” and need drugging to the max (some of them even believe this so much that they have even written books on the subject!). So you are never going to have any luck convincing these people that their views are wrong and yours are right (especially on the ward where you are the raving psychiatric patient and they are the highly trained professionals).
An important psychiatric concept to understand is “insight” – if a patient does not believe they are ill and need medication then they are said to lack ”insight” into their condition; the cleverest part of this concept is that psychiatrists say that this lack of “insight” is actually caused by your “illness”. So basically if you don’t agree with them that is just more proof that you are ill!
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Anonymous2015-01-13 14:41
I once read a quote from a patient who that said they kept giving her ECT (that’s seizure inducing electric shocks to the brain, widely used in the UK in-spite of people thinking it is some horrible relic of history that was banned along with public executions and badger-baiting). Every time after they had electro-shocked her brain they asked if she felt better. She kept on saying “No”, so they kept on giving her more ECT. Eventually she figured out if that if she said “Yes” they would stop giving her ECT, and it worked! This was of course recorded as a successful outcome and used to prove that ECT works
>>11 You know people are put under complete anaesthetic for ECT, right? As psychiatric treatments go, there's actually more real evidence for it working for depression than there is for most of medical psychiatry.
>>14 I'm not about to defend medical psychiatry; most of it really is fucking embarrassing. I'm just saying that when you hold up ECT as an example of its excesses, all you're doing is showing that you don't have a clue what you're talking about. Yeah, electricity is scary and deliberately shocking people sounds barbaric. So does deliberately cutting people open. That doesn't make appendectomies pseudo-science.
You know people are put under complete anaesthetic for ECT, right?
I live in Russia and my GF once got depression, so relatives committed her and psychiatrists administered ECT, and she wasn't put under any anesthetic. Dunno if western psychiatry is any different.
As a programmer you should read some neuroscience papers to understand that ECT and medications are overly rough tools to change patient's behavior without harming him.
As an anarchist and freedom fighter should be against involuntarily changing people's opinions and behaviors, as long as they don't psychically harm others.
I've received ECT involuntarily. They do sedate you, but it is still fubar. You are strapped to a table by a couple of orderlies, have a needle jammed into your arm, and next thing you know you wake up strapped to a chair in a puddle of your own piss not knowing how long you have been there, barely cognizant, and your memories are a mess for days. Then repeat this every three days for months at a time until you are finally able to muster enough brain power to figure out that if you agree with everything they say to you it might stop. Still it's better than being slammed around by an orderly having a needle full of Thorazine stabbed into you and being physically thrown into isolation because are confused from all the drugs they are forcing into you and begging the nurse to let you use the phone so you can call your family.
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Anonymous2015-01-15 2:16
>>15 They are both barbaric and administered by idiots that have no idea what they're doing, like a surgeon cutting in the dark and justifying their technique as state of the art because their blindly performed rehearsed movements worked 10% of the time in the past.
