The Right to Health

This is perhaps the most absurd concept I've heard of. Proponents of forced psychiatry (a term which encompasses practitioners, patients, family members as well as many others) keep on talking about a right to health that trumps the right to self-determination.

Firstly, such people are hoisting themselves with their own petard. If people have a right to health, then this right is inclusive both of a right to be protected from psychiatrists, and also, according to the logic built into this concept, people should not even be allowed to see psychiatrists, because psychiatry is profoundly inimical to general health, a simple statement of fact. Psychiatric drugs, for example, are terrible for your health, and are a contributory factor in the dramatic decline in life expectancy of mental patients. Neuroleptics have caused millions of cases of tardive dyskinesia, as well as other iatrogenic brain disorders. Psychiatry is no more a force for good health than the Inquisition was for the cause of good, ergo, if there is a right to health, then psychiatry should be abolished altogether because its notorious history of violating the Hippocratic oath.

Such reasoning posits a false trade-off between liberty and health, as if the two were antipodal extremities, in a state of antagonism, as if you can't have the one without the other. It's simply not true. Psychiatry is like a manufactory of the very things it purports to cure, creating brain diseases whilst supposedly treating speculative ones, creating more trauma in already traumatised individuals, fostering the maladaptive behaviour it purports to correct. So much for a right to health!

Secondly, it's absurd to talk about a "right to health". It's like talking about "a right to good weather" or "a right to immortality", in that ill health is a part of life, one of life's immutables, ergo there can be no right to health. It's preposterous, a logically absurd proposition, no less logically absurd than the beliefs of many so-called "seriously mentally ill" patients. It's an endictment of the intellectual bankruptcy of these people, whose supposed "sanity" and capacity for rational thought is ironically taken for granted in modern society.

TBC

Yet curiously, people with real diseases that have a foundation in scientifc fact are excluded from this right, there are no "hospitals", for example, for misbehaving diabetics or cancer patients, where people are forced ongoing to comply with a treatment regimen, no community treatment teams for these people. The injustice! Needless to say, I don't think there'll be many protests from these people for this infringement of their "right to health"!

Such a proposition, to borrow from Pitt, is the creed of slaves and the plea of tyrants, in this case, the former being patients who like being coerced, and the latter being psychiatrists who like to coerce.

Some, objecting to my first criticism of the concept, may equivocate the issue, saying that we're talking not about physical health but mental health, a concept so vague and ultimately elastic, so based on speculation (albeit speculations given superficial weight by custom and their uncritical acceptance amongst intellectual, scientific, legal and medical authorities), that it is impossible to ascertain the degree to which psychiatry is good for "mental health", let alone involuntary psychiatry. Nevertheless, according to my idea of what some people would describe as "mental health", forced psychiatry is most certainly inefficacious, because it fails to reckon with the dignity of the patient, and the fact that such degrading treatment and incursions usually make of men either slaves or wild animals. The former state is no doubt considered "mentally healthy" by the state, but what about the latter? On top of this, the effects of the drugs themselves cause many of the problems considered indicative of mental pathology in psychiatrized societies, and can occasion mental anguish and torment qualitatively distinct from and quantitavely perhaps several orders of magnitude above what the general run of humanity will ever experience, pushing you to the extremity of mental torture. Is persistent mental torment and anguish a mark of what is metaphorically described as a healthy mind? Perhaps what they mean is the right to ill health, and not good health.

-- Mon Feb 24, 2014 7:53 pm --

A right to health my arse!

That should be "equivocate on the issue".

These people don't have a sensible argument. Everyone of there arguments will come off as some "father knows best" type of self righteous foolishness. The truth is any government doing this or making up rules that allow people to do this is too far reaching.

Like it has been said above they are not forcing people to take there heart disease medicine. They can't force HIV or Aids patients to not have sex as a protection against causing harm to other people.

The mental health field is simply a field that is getting away with too much.

1013 victim wrote:They can't force HIV or Aids patients to not have sex as a protection against causing harm to other people.

No but they can and do prosecute them if the other party was not aware of their diagnosis.

Cledwyn Bulbs wrote:Firstly, such people are hoisting themselves with their own petard. If people have a right to health, then this right is inclusive both of a right to be protected from psychiatrists, and also, according to the logic built into this concept, people should not even be allowed to see psychiatrists,

I would state here that they have the right to be protected from psychiatrists if that is their choice. Unfortunately, I think where the discrepancy comes up here and with this statement:

Cledwyn Bulbs wrote:Yet curiously, people with real diseases that have a foundation in scientifc fact are excluded from this right, there are no "hospitals", for example, for misbehaving diabetics or cancer patients, where people are forced ongoing to comply with a treatment regimen, no community treatment teams for these people.

is when risk to others is concerned. There is so much stigma around mental health that people fear others who have this type of diagnosis. They have been force fed the idea that everyone who is not force fed medication will end up on a killing rampage. Even though the likely hood that someone diagnosed with a psychiatric disability will do these types of acts is a lot lower than generalized society, the stigma and fear is still there. Plus, the few that do end up doing these types of things enhance that stigma even more. I don't see news articles about people whose blood sugars were low and went out and committed a violent crime, or a cancer patient who was about to die. I think that is what the difference is. The stigma and fear.

Cheze2 wrote:

1013 victim wrote:They can't force HIV or Aids patients to not have sex as a protection against causing harm to other people.

No but they can and do prosecute them if the other party was not aware of their diagnosis.

Cledwyn Bulbs wrote:Firstly, such people are hoisting themselves with their own petard. If people have a right to health, then this right is inclusive both of a right to be protected from psychiatrists, and also, according to the logic built into this concept, people should not even be allowed to see psychiatrists,

I would state here that they have the right to be protected from psychiatrists if that is their choice. Unfortunately, I think where the discrepancy comes up here and with this statement:

Cledwyn Bulbs wrote:Yet curiously, people with real diseases that have a foundation in scientifc fact are excluded from this right, there are no "hospitals", for example, for misbehaving diabetics or cancer patients, where people are forced ongoing to comply with a treatment regimen, no community treatment teams for these people.

is when risk to others is concerned. There is so much stigma around mental health that people fear others who have this type of diagnosis. They have been force fed the idea that everyone who is not force fed medication will end up on a killing rampage. Even though the likely hood that someone diagnosed with a psychiatric disability will do these types of acts is a lot lower than generalized society, the stigma and fear is still there. Plus, the few that do end up doing these types of things enhance that stigma even more. I don't see news articles about people whose blood sugars were low and went out and committed a violent crime, or a cancer patient who was about to die. I think that is what the difference is. The stigma and fear.

They only prosecute when you knowingly infect someone. I said they can't force them to not have sex as a protection against causing harm to others. I said it the way I said it for a reason because prosecuting someone after they have already committed a crime is not what involuntarily committing people or forcing medicine on them is. You are talking apples to oranges.

The equivalent would be forcing all people with HIV or Aids into buildings and keeping them there basically 24 hrs a day while shooting them up with medicine to kill there sex drives. If you did that there would be a massive outcry and rampant claims of discrimination.

the connection I was trying to make (and I'm glad that you pointed this out because I don't think I was being too clear-it was late for me when I posted this ) was that when they force people to take medications, or involuntarily admit them, in their mind they are prosecuting them after they have committed a "crime" or rather something that constitutes the amount of risk they foresee towards that person or others. I'm not saying that this is right, or that the system isn't flawed but that this is their thinking.

Very well said Cledwyn

Cheze2 wrote:the connection I was trying to make (and I'm glad that you pointed this out because I don't think I was being too clear-it was late for me when I posted this ) was that when they force people to take medications, or involuntarily admit them, in their mind they are prosecuting them after they have committed a "crime" or rather something that constitutes the amount of risk they foresee towards that person or others. I'm not saying that this is right, or that the system isn't flawed but that this is their thinking.

Please, you can't be serious. Now you are a mind reader? There are reports of them putting people on involuntary holds, which is sending them to a behavior center against there wills for being malnutritioned, what law did that person break or crime did they commit? They put me on a hold simply because they wanted to, nothing at all had happened other than them lying and exaggerating.