In 1973, psychiatrist Darold A. Treffert, M.D., published an article titled"Dying with Their Rights On" in theThe piece, written in the midst of the antipsychiatry trend of the late 1960s and early 1970s, lamented increased legal restrictions on mental health professionals to hospitalize and treat sick patients. These patients, according to Treffert, were quite literallyin homeless shelters, jails, under overpasses, and in the basements of abandoned houses.
Three weeks later, Frank attempted to dig out the electrical device in his brain with a kitchen knife. When this was unsuccessful, he killed himself in his dorm room after shooting himself in the head with a handgun.
To insist that involuntary treatment for the gravely ill is a threat to individual freedom, as Thomas Szasz argued for decades, is to turn the concept of freedom on its head. The sickest psychiatric patients—those most in need of involuntary treatment—have no real freedom at all; instead, they are restricted by their illness, which frequently renders them unable to work, go to school, maintain a home, or make any appreciable free choices in the world.
MarkLRuffalo The laws inhibit the ability of loved ones of the chronically mentally ill to get them help. I not only worked in that field but know from life experience the despair.
MarkLRuffalo One would think Canada would treat them a little differently.