The position of the committee given in the guidelines on Article 14 appears to be completely untenable and fundamentally conflicts with the Article 10 right to life. Unless I have profoundly misunderstood their arguments, their position is that someone with a mental illness or intellectual disability may not be deprived of liberty on the basis of that illness or disability (or risks following from that illness or disability), ever, under any circumstances.

That interpretation would forbid the carer of someone with severe intellectual disabilities from stopping them if they tried to run into traffic. It would forbid a care home for people with severe dementia from preventing patients from wandering off, even if those patients are agitated, disoriented and non-verbal. It would forbid a paramedic from tackling someone who is distressed, delusional and trying to jump off a rooftop.

There is a perfectly legitimate argument to be had about the legitimacy of institutionalisation - even brief, time-limited institutionalisation - but these guidelines make a nonsense of the CPRD. It seems to me to be self-evident that some people lack the mental capacity to act in their own self-interests at least some of the time and would, left to their own devices, be at serious risk of death. I do not understand how the right to life and the absolute right to liberty can be compatible.

> detaining people [...] because they pose a risk of danger to themselves or others - are also forbidden.

What he actual fuck? If someone is out waving a knife around in the street because the voices in their head are telling them to, we very much DO need to detain them, for their safety and the safety of others. Who cares what any "committee" says about it?

You could have read the document before spewing toxic FUD about the kind of things mentally ill people supposedly do.

Here's the section that addresses your concern: "All persons, including those with disabilities, have a duty to do no harm. Legal systems based on the rule of law have criminal and other laws in place to deal with the breach of this obligation. Persons with disabilities are frequently denied equal protection under these laws by being diverted to a separate track of law, including through mental health laws. These laws and procedures commonly have a lower standard when it comes to human rights protection, particularly the right to due process and fair trial, and are incompatible with article 13 in conjunction with article 14 of the Convention."

A somewhat analogous issue has been pointed out with the juvenile justice system in the US. Ostensibly, these "softer" courts allow for a less formal approach that will help young offenders; in reality, that lack basic due process protections, hurting the innocent and helping only the guilty. Really, it's the same as any other argument for fewer protections against government: these hassles get in the way, so just get rid of them and trust us more.

> What results is an environment where boundaries are blurred and children accused of crimes are made to believe that everyone in the courtroom is there to “help” them when, in reality, defense attorneys are the only parties obligated to advocate on their behalf.

- The Marshall Project, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/05/15/give-juveniles...

But it seems wrong to put a mentally ill person in jail for crimes a lot of the time because it isn't necessarily within their control and/or they lack mens rhea.

So either we have 2 tracks or we continue to fill jails with the mentally ill even though it is obviously an incorrect application of justice.

Here we go again with the FUD: "mentally ill people often behave in ... dangerous ways". This kind of claim is harmful to the mentally ill as a group, because it is just not true. The vast majority of mentally ill people are not dangerous.

You seem to be arguing also that it is only the mentally ill who often behave in "unexpected, illogical and dangerous ways". The reality is that humans in general sometimes do that, whether or not they have a clinical mental health problem. The way your comment insinuates that the mentally ill are sub-human is repellent, but I suppose you might not even realize that you are doing that.

You may think of yourself as a model of logical, predictable and safe behaviour. I'm so tired of engineers who deny that there is any irrational element in their makeup. It is a naive thing to claim and a lame kind of deluded bid for superiority. "Others might be irrational, but not me!" Spare us. That attitude is the curse of HN and YC.

My brother was hospitalized several times because of psychosis. While he didn't actually do any physical harm to us, he did threaten verbally, wave a knife and even grabbed me by the neck. In the small town my parents live in, a person I know also has delusional thoughts, he is now in jail for stabbing his father (while sleeping). Another kid in a nearby town stabbed his mother not long ago, also with mental problems. So, I don't know what my brother is capable of, but I don't think we really need to find out and I think he is grateful that nothing bad had happened during his several episodes. One note though, every hospitalization was voluntary. They gave him a form to sign and he did. I don't know if he understood what he was singing though, but tricking people into hospitalization is somehow better for respecting human rights than forcing it.

>The vast majority of mentally ill people are not dangerous.

Now can you talk about the minority who are dangerous to themselves and others around them and what should be done about them?

> Also, the comment you're replying to did nothing to indicate that the mentally ill are subhuman.

Probably the scare-quotes around "human rights" in the first sentence when in the context of the mentally ill, and talking about protecting humans from them as if they weren't human, too.

I suppose it's ambiguous, but it's not hard to interpret it like that.

I don't believe in human rights. But about the second part: by "humans" I also meant the mentally ill. (By helping them, you're protecting them from themselves, too.)

Yes, I figured. What do you mean about not believing in human rights, though? I'm intrigued.

I mean you can't be saying you don't believe they exist, because they're a human invention. Are you saying you don't believe they should exist?

Not sure about parent commenter, but it's not that uncommon in ethical theories. A good example is Act Utilitarianism, which holds that the moral value of an act is solely based on its consequences, specifically its increase on net happiness (how to quantify that, of course, is the big problem).

Thus, a scenario could be developed, however unlikely, in which any particular action would be moral or immoral if the world was defined so that it would increase or decrease net happiness. For example, suppose we knew with certainty that one of three individuals halfway around the world was about to initiate a nuclear launch, but we had no reasonable way to find out which in the next few seconds. AU would clearly support launching a drone strike against all three--against the human right of due process--we would make two families sad, but certainly prevent millions of people around the world from being very sad.

Human rights are a fundamentally deontologist concept (as opposed to Utilitarianism, which is a consequentialist theory), basing the morality of an action on its compliance with certain standards and not on its consequences. For example, you might argue that someone has an inherent/inalienable right to do X, even though it would cause great harm or make many people unhappy. For example, you might argue someone had the right to publish classified information that would almost certainly lead to the start of a war.

Also, you say that human rights are a human inventions--some philosophers would argue that they are inherent (either from god(s), by virtue of reason, or some other external source). This is the position the US Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence take, informed by the Enlightenment tradition. They claim that certain rights are not granted by the government or society but intrinsically exist and thus must not be infringed (taking a Deist position, they cite a generic "Creator" as their source). A consequentialist could support a lesser, human-sourced set of rights that made a general rule, but not an inviolable one.

The concept of human rights says that every human who is born is entitled to this list of rights. I think that's silly for many reasons. Most important is that that list of rights is completely skewed to a Western, liberal view of the world. It's basically imperialism.

There is no shortage of laws that can be used to do exactly that, and I think it's quite an extreme interpretation you put forth here.

Just to name a few:

* conspiracy to commit a whole range of crimes, including murder

* threatening people with an actual weapon

* threatening people

BUT this would prevent mental health "professionals" from detaining light or "highly functional" cases of things like autism and forcing "treatment" (confinement, nothing more) on them. And let's not forget that they are very much not above forcing themselves with brutal violence, locks and forced medication onto perfectly healthy patients when given the chance [1].

Nor are they above causing mental health issues in order to create themselves easy patients. [2] Or just lying. [3] (note: this is one of the centres where psychiatry was developed)

Those easy but involuntary patients would be replaced, out of necessity, with people with actual mental disabilities, homeless, who need constant care, are addicted, destroy the place and/or are actually dangerous to the staff. In other words, almost exclusively patients that cannot be helped and/or are dangerous. This would destroy psychiatry.

Good riddance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_psychiatry [3] https://www.thelocal.ch/20190701/locked-up-for-being-differe...

Sure, but the idea is that if someone is schizophrenic and threatening people, it would be better for the patient and society if she was admitted to a psych unit and treated, and possibly able to return her life, rather than incarcerating her for some time, releasing her untreated and then the same thing happening again and now she has a criminal record.

As a resident psychiatrist, I can tell you that most of the time I'm not conflicted about involuntarily admitting a patient, at my institution it happens rarely, almost all patients sign in voluntarily and can request to leave, in fact most of the time we deal with patients who actually want to get admitted and will feign symptoms to do so, forcing us to admit them. The times we involuntarily admit patients are when they are so symptomatic that they would very likely die without treatment (e.g. they refuse to eat because they think their food is poisoned).

Every field has its history of controversies, that doesn't mean the field as a whole is inherently bad.

> Every field has its history of controversies, that doesn't mean the field as a whole is inherently bad.

Psychiatry has gotten caught, repeatedly, at a 100% false positive rate. Think about it, from a mathematical point of view: anything significantly over 50% can only be the result of fraud. Or more specifically, declaring patients ill irrespective of the variable: the patient. Just being completely wrong will only ever get you to 50%, so let's say you might get to 55% on a particularly bad day, but anything higher is fraud.

This has not happened in just 1 experiment but has been repeated, and repeated, and repeated again. In the 19th, 20th and 21st century.

Furthermore actual diseases have systematically been removed from psychiatry. Everything from epilepsy, seizures, milk allergies in children (yes, really), multiple sclerosis, cancer (esp. brain tumors), various hormone imbalances, a number of parasitic infections and other "unexplained" diseases that may interfere with normal behavior (either directly, or for example by causing long-term pain. Or simply by having symptoms but being undiagnoseable (or merely undiagnosed). For example, in both cancer and multiple sclerosis patients may present with symptoms in some cases years before a test for the disease shows a positive result. In the case of cancer a test may in fact remain negative right up to the point the patient dies, diagnoses have been corrected through autopsies where it really wasn't the docter's fault. But the problem is, when referred to psychiatrists, these patients were generally diagnosed with mental illnesses, and treated, in quite a few cases right into the grave.

Psychiatrists had all sorts of very convincing theories (except not really if you read them) how they were going to fix these. Needless to say, none of them were ever verified experimentally, and quite a few have been caught at outright fraud. Even Freud himself is known to have knowingly contributed to help perpetrators of rape hide their crimes by convincing women they didn't happen, and using violence when that failed.

And when you read today's psychiatric theories, for example about EMDR, you know: give it 10 years, and we'll know it to be a fraud as well. Shapiro had plenty of chances, more than enough data, patients, and all the authority and places to publish she could possibly want to verify her treatment. She didn't. Not in over 2 decades. Give it 10 years, and we'll know: it's because she knows it, and herself, to be a fraud. Even if you believe that she wasn't sure, that would mean you concede that she experimented on patients for 2 decades. Any other medical practitioner would not just have been fired, they would have been convicted to decades of prison.

And let's take today's favorite diagnosis Autism/ADHD/Autism Spectrum Disorder. I'm going to have to violate Godwin's law on that one. It sounds absurd, but it's true: Hans Asperger invented that ... to "justify" the large scale killing of Polish and Jewish children in "Aktion T4". Let me just provide a link because I would readily understand you not believing me [1]. This guy is revered by today's psychiatrists, for the same reason Freud was. Not, of course, because he helped people, in fact he killed far more than Dr. Mengele, but because he enabled psychiatry to grow.

Even the more benign theories, like famously Taylorism, turned out to be ... a fraud. Quite simply a fraud. There is zero chance Taylor believed in his theories himself, as he paid people to lie about them.

Second, clear patterns of fraud keep coming forward over time. Famously "hysteria" and, of course, running away from a slave master ("drapetomania"), getting raped, being female in general, being gay (although choosing voluntarily for prostitution is still "being treated" with the patients incarcerated. Well, only for women of course). It turns out psychiatry was only used for social control in those (many) cases. The fight against psychiatrists was an important (and now de-emphasized) part of emancipation in both cases.

HIV actually manages to fall into both categories. God's punishment for being gay, with of course psychiatrists making sure some of that heavenly punishment is not just restricted to posthumous roasting.

Today is different ? Let me just say "VERY unlikely". If something was true for 200 years, and there haven't been any big changes ... why would anyone believe it has changed ?

And psychiatry doesn't actually help patients. This is a somewhat problematic issue that keeps popping up. In empirical studies, it keeps coming forward that many psychiatric treatments don't work better than a placebo. A great number of treatments, that are nevertheless used, are known to be far worse than doing nothing at all. There isn't a single involuntary treatment that's empirically verified better than a placebo despite more than a hundred years of searching for one. Antidepressants are famous for their incredibly bad long-term effects, yet psychiatrists keep prescribing them. Before you say "pharmacological industry", THEY label their products as having a maximum indicated usage of weeks to months. Psychiatrists and even nurses however, give them to patients for years, with disastrous effects. For children Ritalin (and Valium before it) are known to have extreme negative effects on child development with anything but extreme short term use. Valium was in fact quite exceptional in that it's long term effects were relatively benign, but it was addictive and therefore a drug. But it gave much less serious long term problems, especially compared to prozac/fluoxetin/SSRIs, what they use now. The problem with Valium was also that it was abused on a large scale, and when push comes to shove, it's similar to keeping a kid drunk for years, even if liver failure is much less likely. But of course sedation leads to serious problems if it's used for any length of time. Again, any other medical practitioner giving patients medications beyond their indicated usage with known bad effects on the patient ... would lead to jail time.

It's time that the same becomes true for psychiatrists and social workers.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05112-1

Freud is not really revered by most psychology professors, at least from the textbooks and professors I had had. They all characterized him as somehow who was one of the first to start looking at psychology in a new way, but one who whose theories had little relevance to the modern world, little basis in fact, and serious problems with its view toward humans.

Also: he systematically defended serial rapists by using violence against women and kids and there are even some indications he did more than just defend them.

He, like a LOT of famous psychiatrists, certainly also including Hans Asperger, should be treated like dr. Mengele and excised from the profession, all their theories replaced in psychological texts, to be replaced with a warning. Like in medical texts that there were famous and incredibly horrible crimes committed by famous psychiatrists.

The only use Freud and Asperger should have for the profession is to illustrate the need for an ethical code of conduct and severe penalties for even mild violations of it. Because you just cannot imagine how horrible the lives of quite a few people got with "help" from these people.