When describing the process of getting someone involuntarily committed to be evaluated for court-ordered treatment, the engineer at my graphite manufacturer sai

When describing the process of getting someone involuntarily committed to be evaluated for court-ordered treatment, the engineer at my graphite manufacturer said “Really, you can do that? … I’m going today.” One of his old friends has been self-destructive/’crazy’ for a while. They suspected he was using methamphetamine. On the one hand, people who are ‘crazy’ won’t seek and can’t consent to medical care. This is certainly how we ended up with “mental health courts” and “court-ordered treatment”. But most of the treatments that the courts order people to submit to are palliative rather than curative. The courts have to order people to take the worst of the drugs, the sedatives (”anti-psychotics” [1]), because they wouldn’t take them otherwise [2]. [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4118918/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4118918/ [2] "Drugs and Behavior: An Introduction to Behavioral Pharmacology", by William McKim If society is going to force treatment on people, we ought to help them while we’re at it. But the system I’ve observed over these past few months is little more than a haphazard collection of poor practices. Robert Whitaker [3], author of Mad in America, does a good job of heckling the status quo, but they haven’t reached a threshold where they can demonstrate dramatically better strategies for helping people through their mental problems. [3] http://www.madinamerica.com/robert-whitakers/ http://www.madinamerica.com/robert-whitakers/