I think that we need to be careful about when to say someone has lost her ability to reason. I don’t think that that’s literally true of the vast majority of people who are locked up in modern psychoprisons. The patterns of behavior, thought, emotion, etc. that get labeled paranoid schizophrenia, major depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, etc. don’t actually involve a loss of the ability to reason; they may involve somebody reasoning badly, but of course that’s not the same thing as not being able to reason at all. My view is that as long as someone retains the capacity to meaningfully state I want to leave this hospital,
they should have the right to do so immediately and unconditionally so long as they pose no imminent threat to anyone other than themselves.
I don’t think it’s O.K.
that anyone should suffer what your friend suffered. (I also have many friends who have been admitted to mental wards, both voluntarily and involuntarily, at one time or another in their lives, and almost always because they were going through some really intense psychological suffering.) But while I don’t have a basic problem with the existence of psychiatric care centers in hospitals, I don’t think that involuntary commitment or imprisonment in those wards is any kind of way to deal with that issue. Individually it involves degrading and coercing the person that you’re supposedly trying to help, by ignoring or actively overriding their express wishes. Structurally, it creates an institutional environment where all kinds of atrocities can be, and are, inflicted on helpless patients by their so-called caretakers,
through the use of restraints, forced drugging, electric shock, and other forms of coercion, in order to pacify or simply suppress unwilling patients
who (quite reasonably) resent having help
forced on them against their wills.
It must never be forgotten that, because of precisely that institutional structure, only 40 years ago inmates psychiatric wards were routinely tortured with physical restraints, with beatings, with camphor injections, with insulin shocks, with electric shocks to the brain, and ultimately with an icepick driven through their eye sockets into the frontal lobes of their brain. (Q: What’s the difference between a U.S. mental ward in the 1960s and Abu Ghraib? A: The location.) Today they face the same restraints and beatings, are sometimes subjected to the same electroshock therapies,
are routinely forced to take neuroleptic drugs (recognized as a form of torture when the same was done to Soviet political dissidents), etc.
People who are suffering with the grab-bag of different conditions today labeled mental illnesses
shouldn’t have to suffer through that. It’s perfectly reasonable to want there to be empathetic people and safe and caring environments in which they can work through what they are going through. There’s a place for that in a free and loving society; probably even a place for people who are professionally dedicated to doing things like that. But it has to be done with respect, and patience, and by means of outreach and persuasion. It cannot be done through court orders and locked wards and straitjackets. That way has been tried, and it has been shown all too clearly where it leads.