Wednesday 24 March 2010

Involuntary "treatment" to reduce the use of involuntary "treatment"

It's enough to drive you to despair, but nevertheless I was laughing my ass off when I read this article yesterday.

So-called "assisted outpatient treatment", make that involuntary or forced outpatient "treatment", has been discussed a lot again in Denmark lately. Both shrinks and relatives think that it is simply too bad that the current Danish legislation doesn't allow for forced "treatment" after someone is released from a psych prison, which according to the article results in some severely ill people throwing out their, as the article has it, "necessary" dope again and again at the first occasion, and becoming "psychotic" once again.

The article quotes the former Danish Health Minister, Jakob Axel Nielsen, who was preparing a bill that, if followed up by his successor, Bertel Haarder, and passed by the Folketinget, will come into force in October this year, allowing for involuntary outpatient "treatment" for people who've been re-incarcerated three times, and at least one of these times because they stopped taking their "medication":

"I simply hope that involuntary outpatient treatment will reduce the use of involuntary treatment as far as these patients are concerned."

With such an outstanding ability to reason logically, it is no wonder that politicians are so easily deceived by the shrinks' and NAMI-relatives' "logic".

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Unfortunately, Babelfish doesn't have a Danish translator. When you say "psych prison" do you mean just a regular psychiatric hospital, a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane, or do you mean a regular prison hospital?
If you mean a regular psychiatric hospital, that would mean that, in Denmark, at least, my son would be forced to take the meds that we managed to wean him off of, with our permission. The critics would say that he ended up tying up a hospital bed for three months because he had a relapse that he wouldn't otherwise have had. This is a debatable point, but there are public resources involved . . .

Marian said...

Rossa: I mean a regular psych "hospital". IMO it's like Szasz says, if you can't just walk out the door and leave the building whenever you want, it's not a hospital, it's a prison.

Have you tried Google Translate? But beware, these automatically generated translations can be tricky. I recently saw that someone had Google Translate to translate one of my Danish posts. Title of the post: "Psykiater indrømmer, at psykiatrien ikke er et medicinsk speciale" which translates into: Psychiatrist admits that psychiatry is not a medical speciality. Google translation: Psychiatrist admits that psychiatry is a medical speciality. OMG! Strangely, when I ask Google to translate only the word "ikke" there's no problem.

It certainly is a debatable point as it is, or should be by now, a known fact, that neuroleptics don't really prevent relapses, are of little if any use in the long term, and actually can be said to chronify crisis. The problem is that most politicians don't have a clue, and in addition don't have any interest in doing some research on their own, which lets them more or less completely believe in whatever the "experts" tell them. Also I think, Will Hall makes an important point when he in his keynote address at last year's INTAR conference (part one of four, great talk!) says that there is this general attitude in society that views the person in crisis as the problem that society has to do something about. Instead of viewing crisis as a reaction to something problematic outside the individual, which would make it society's problem, not the individual's. To blame the individual and close one's eyes to everything that in one or the other way points to society being the problem, instead of the individual, is "no-fault insurance against personal responsibility" as Loren Mosher wrote in his Letter of Resignation from the APA.

It's an interaction of society's inflated, grandiose ego's reluctance to give up on its delusion of its own absolute blamelessness and to be held responsible, and the ignorance this reluctance creates and maintains. The ego will pay whatever it costs to avoid the delusion to be deconstructed. Whether the valuta is cash or human lives (those of others).

Marian said...

BTW. You can see the same pattern at play in regard to all kinds of war. If it's between nations, or against certain, identified individuals like "the mentally ill". Society is willing to pay enormous amounts both of cash and human lives in order to keep up the collective delusion of its own infallibility.

Mark p.s.2 said...

Science needs a math problem-solution for evil and anger. So it creates an US and THEM. "US" being sane "THEM" being insane.
A person named a slave-disease-illness can only be what is expected of them, and in my experience, events set-up for them to fail and fulfil their designation.
Who is educating the mentally ill?
No one, emotions are brain chemical imbalances and they just need corrective chemicals. Right, not.
Love is good and sane, but hate violence is evil-criminal and insane, when love and hate are both just emotions, and you can't have one without the other. Denying humans are just like any other animal (potentially violent if angry) is insane.

Duane Sherry said...

Marian,

A vision... to end "involuntary treatment" in the United States, and around the world -

http://discoverandrecover.wordpress.com/mental-health-freedom-and-recovery-act/

Call me a "dreamer," been called worse.

Duane