Whoa there. As a past inpatient of a psychiatric hospital, I can tell you that respecting the human rights of patients is the number one area of failure of the

Whoa there. As a past inpatient of a psychiatric hospital, I can tell you that respecting the human rights of patients is the number one area of failure of the psychiatric "community". As such, increased respect for the human rights of patients is not to be sneezed at. As far as benefit to science is concerned, things don't look good on that front. Psychiatry is essentially a state-sponsored pseudoscience, concerned far more with normative behaviour and social control that with understanding mental illness. It's an unpleasant field to work in, with the result (I suspect) that only the stupid or unfortunate in the medical professions end up there. (Richard Bentall's books are a good place to start if you want a balanced, "evidence based" and intellectually rigorous perspective on the field.)