Because the “in-community care” bleeding hearts of twenty years ago had their cause usurped by governments who wanted to cut our mental health institutions in a bait-n-switch, and left the mental health and addictions problem fester for two decades without having built any replacements.
What did we do? Bought up roach motels, and put vulnerable people within arms reach of street drug dealers peddling psychosis inducing amphetamines, and/or crippling opioids, with government sanctioned methadone industry tying it all together.
So now, when people get picked up, they’re in beyond crisis.
I get our institutions were outdated, and needed a modern model, but tearing them down without building replacements like mental health villages in place (like the dementia villages in the nordic countries) was a Cardinal sin.
What is actually meant is something closer to “preventative detention”. This is evident from the repeated appeals to the criminal or pseudo-criminal nature of the behaviour and conduct that is to justify the “treatment”.
The only kind of treatment that is available when a person doesn’t wish to cooperate is to lock them up in some way. It is a nonsensical concept. There are edge cases where a physician has a strong incentive to do so for the interests of the patient. But the civil rights case law is pretty reluctant with long-term forced psychiatric drugging, for example. If someone can write a coherent letter saying they don’t want that you need a reason to compel it. Being mentally present for a criminal trial is one. But if they’ve been NCR’d to a psych hospital for the rest of their lives they’re allowed to refuse drugs generally if they’re coherent enough to be able to express that. Don’t like the side effects? Their choice. It is their mind after all.
And that’s with people who *have* been found NCR after committing a defined criminal and being found to have committed the act to the evidence required in a criminal court (so all the criminal procedural protections available) though not responsible.
How little evidence and how few signatures and how little review would be necessary to get *you* into a locked room somewhere? How would you appeal? What would be the mechanism? Your guarantee of eventual release? Procedural protections? Standard of evidence? Does this comply with our concept of habeas corpus?
DrunkCivilServant on
“conspicuously higher detention rates in places with larger percentages of Indigenous populations suggest racism might be a factor, too.”
I wonder if the author would come to the same conclusion whereby ‘conspicuously higher detention rates in places with larger percentages of White populations suggest racism might be a factor, too……
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Because the “in-community care” bleeding hearts of twenty years ago had their cause usurped by governments who wanted to cut our mental health institutions in a bait-n-switch, and left the mental health and addictions problem fester for two decades without having built any replacements.
What did we do? Bought up roach motels, and put vulnerable people within arms reach of street drug dealers peddling psychosis inducing amphetamines, and/or crippling opioids, with government sanctioned methadone industry tying it all together.
So now, when people get picked up, they’re in beyond crisis.
I get our institutions were outdated, and needed a modern model, but tearing them down without building replacements like mental health villages in place (like the dementia villages in the nordic countries) was a Cardinal sin.
The phrase “involuntary treatment” per se doesn’t show up in this article but it has been used [elsewhere in the media](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/sask-involuntary-treatment-9.7004353). I find it a particularly pernicious term.
What is actually meant is something closer to “preventative detention”. This is evident from the repeated appeals to the criminal or pseudo-criminal nature of the behaviour and conduct that is to justify the “treatment”.
The only kind of treatment that is available when a person doesn’t wish to cooperate is to lock them up in some way. It is a nonsensical concept. There are edge cases where a physician has a strong incentive to do so for the interests of the patient. But the civil rights case law is pretty reluctant with long-term forced psychiatric drugging, for example. If someone can write a coherent letter saying they don’t want that you need a reason to compel it. Being mentally present for a criminal trial is one. But if they’ve been NCR’d to a psych hospital for the rest of their lives they’re allowed to refuse drugs generally if they’re coherent enough to be able to express that. Don’t like the side effects? Their choice. It is their mind after all.
And that’s with people who *have* been found NCR after committing a defined criminal and being found to have committed the act to the evidence required in a criminal court (so all the criminal procedural protections available) though not responsible.
How little evidence and how few signatures and how little review would be necessary to get *you* into a locked room somewhere? How would you appeal? What would be the mechanism? Your guarantee of eventual release? Procedural protections? Standard of evidence? Does this comply with our concept of habeas corpus?
“conspicuously higher detention rates in places with larger percentages of Indigenous populations suggest racism might be a factor, too.”
I wonder if the author would come to the same conclusion whereby ‘conspicuously higher detention rates in places with larger percentages of White populations suggest racism might be a factor, too……