Psychiatry: Force of Law

As seen on the Psych Rights website. An extended discussion about the effect of Psychiatry on the law.

The purpose of this article is to set forth just the basic legal principles, underpinnings and practices employed in the widespread use of legal force to compel unwilling patients into locked psychiatric hospitals and, most importantly, force brain damaging drugs and other brain damaging treatments such as Electroshock upon them over their desperate, but hopeless objections. The companion article, Unwarranted Court Ordered Medication: A Call to Action, describes what might be done about it and this article is really background for that one. In addition, there are a number of excellent law review articles on the subject, a small sampling of which are listed at the end of this article.

One interesting tidbit:

The psychiatric profession explicitly acknowledges psychiatrists regularly lie to the courts in order to obtain forced treatment orders. E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., probably the most prominent proponent of involuntary psychiatric treatment says:

It would probably be difficult to find any American Psychiatrist working with the mentally ill who has not, at a minimum, exaggerated the dangerousness of a mentally ill person's behavior to obtain a judicial order for commitment.

Torrey, E. Fuller. 1997. Out of the Shadows: Confronting America's Mental Illness Crisis. New York: John Wiley and Sons. 152.

Dr. Torrey goes on to say this lying to the courts is a good thing. Dr. Torrey also quotes Psychiatrist Paul Applebaum as saying when "confronted with psychotic persons who might well benefit from treatment, and who would certainly suffer without it, mental health professionals and judges alike were reluctant to comply with the law," noting that in "'the dominance of the commonsense model,' the laws are sometimes simply disregarded."