Forcing Patients To Take Medication

I have recently started working with people with mental illness, they have told me that in the past, they had wonderful lives, happy lives, they explained that their mental illness were uncomfortable but tolerable. They went to see their psychiatrists and thats when their lives changed forever.

They were put on psychiatric drugs to "fix them" and now they tell me they feel like zombies, they were robbed of their creativity and voices. because sometimes its easier to just drug up a mental patient then to actually sit there and help them through their problems.

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 compell 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 court system is even worse, most mental patients are thrown into the system and lost, they are ignored and injected with horrible drugs against their wills.With respect to the mental illness diagnosis, itself, when a psychiatrist decides that a person has a mental illness and that person disagrees, according to the psychiatrist, that disagreement just shows the person lacks "insight" and is in itself proof of the mental illness. Catch-22.

The impetus for this article is the realization that the scientific basis for these forced treatments is non-existent and they are permanently damaging hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.  No other field of medicine allows this sort of forced treatment.  Of course, there are many people who see psychiatrists and voluntarily, even eagerly, take psychiatric medications.  This article has absolutely no complaint about this.  It is unwarranted forced treatment that is being addressed.  This article also does not address the issue of somewhat more subtle coercion such as "if you don't take the medication, we will take your housing away from you" or "if you don't take your medication, we will have you committed to the mental hospital." 

 This article is solely concerned with using the force of law (court orders) to compel people to submit to unwarranted psychiatric treatments they do not want.  What  unfolds is a legal system of Catch-22's for the patients and one where the courts have not only abdicated to "professionals" their responsibility to protect the rights of people coming before them.