by Kent Reedy

Created on: December 24, 2008

Probably the most honest way to respond to this proposal is for each person to ask if it should be true for them - in other words, "Should the state be able to forcibly treat me if the authorities decide I am mentally ill, even if they don't believe I am an imminent danger to myself or to anyone else?" Or more simply, is it okay for the government to extract you, or anyone else, from the general population just for seeming to be too different? To me it seems bad enough that the authorities can take someone away just because they suspect that person might be a danger to themselves or to someone else. Psychiatrists aren't very good at predicting who will or won't be dangerous, after all - unless someone has been seriously violent in the past, they really don't have a clue as to how likely they are to be in the future. So you would probably want to put a lot of conditions and limitations on their power to lock someone up for being potentially dangerous (maybe not if it was someone else they were focusing on, but you would if it was you). How much more reluctant should you be, then, to let them forcibly take you away for "treatment" just because you appeared to be too different from the norm?

It may come as a surprise to some that people who are going through seriously distressing emotional crises often welcome outside help in dealing with their inner torment. People who are truly disturbed, and not just disturbing to someone else, aren't as likely to run away from genuine assistance as public portrayals might lead you to expect. They want the assistance to be humane and truly helpful, though, not violent and damaging. The treatment programs that are most brutal and destructive are the ones most inclined to seek the power to force people to participate in them. The extent to which a mental health treatment system tries to force people into it is a good indication of the usefulness of that system - of whether it is more likely to be damaging or helpful to the people who it treats.

Despite all that, treatment that would ordinarily seem helpful and humane can be experienced as violent and brutal by the person being treated if they are forced into it. Forcing someone into treatment is itself an act of violence, after all. It can be traumatic for someone to be forced into treatment, and people in emotional distress often have already been severely traumatized. It's good to have a system that offers help to people in distress, and informs them of what different kinds of

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