Mistaken diagnosis, the Mental Health Act and opportunities for Misfeasance.
By Helen Gavaghan
The Mental Health Act permits a doctor to play a part in detaining a human being with the stroke of a pen and without prior medical consultation. Yet psychiatry is still an inexact science, and one must be careful not to turn it into a vehicle for the abuse of human rights, societal engineering or the creation of a menagerie of Tuskegee-like guinea pigs.
The Mental Health Act also permits a judge with no medical training, no background in molecular biology, genetics or neuroscience, or some other nonqualified person, to work with a doctor with no legal training to siphon human beings into the quasi judicial jurisdiction of the mental health system. This is conflation. In any sensible world a judge does not need a medical report before depriving someone of freedom, nor a potentially prejudicial medical report prior to appeal by the convicted. A doctor has no business being involved in the deprivation of a human being's freedom. It is the sort of thing that destroys doctor-patient relationships.
The same Mental Health Act permits a doctor who has scarcely spoken to a detained person to say that that person must be medicated against their will.
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This is an open invitation to abuse and coercion. Every prejudiced, chauvinist instinct could be satisfied by this act under the comforting guise of telling oneself that one is looking after the supposedly mentally ill. Time after time history has shown us that doctors can be willing to compromise their healing vocation to satisfy a base societal instinct and the need for personal power and money. The death penalty, Nazi Germany and Shipman spring to mind.
That is not the way to power. Our way to power is via the ballot box, lobbying, blogs, letters to the editor, joining and forming of one's own will, with groups of like-minded people with a common purpose or belief system. All in the open. Not by turning judges into social workers and probation officers, police into nurses and doctors into jailers. But that is what the Mental Health Act allows. Are we mad to throw away 1000 years of law, or do we still at heart live with the mindset of the 19th century approach to the mentally ill and/or think it does not matter what happens to people caught by the criminal justice system if they can be relabelled mentally ill whether they are or not, just so long as control is imposed. Guilty or not. Time served or not.
Follow me a little further into the scary highways, by ways and cul-de-sacs of the Mental Health Act.
Take two human beings, each scared, and each recently and wrongly diagnosed with an illness they do not have. One with, say, a heart condition with systemic impacts. The other with one of the suite of so-called psychotic mental illnesses. That is, one has a condition that can affect the brain and body. Oh, I hear you say, that might be either individual. Yes. True. Both have willpower. Both know right from wrong. Both, for whatever reason, have been convicted of harassment without violence (maximum penalty six months). One goes to prison, serves their time, gets on with life. The other is sent to a secure hospital.
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The person sentenced to a secure hospital has no idea when the sentence will end.
The judge uses section 37 of the Mental Health Act. This says medication may be forced not that it must be. The person is forcibly medicated when doing no wrong to self or others. The doctors can do what they want, say what they want. In my case when it seemed I might be freed on appeal if I won my appeal of my conviction (which I did) they sought to put in place a further use of the Mental Health Act that would further deprive me of freedom.
They did this after office hours, when it was too late for me to reach my solicitor. They had no reason nor cause for their abusive act. They failed. But just as I have lived in justifiable fear following the needless interference in and destruction of my life by Dr Paul Sclare in Aberdeen in mid 2004, whilst the law is as it is, I, a perfectly mentally healthy human being, must live in fear of the so-called healing profession. (No one, mentally ill or not should live in such fear).
I have a report now that says I do not have the major psychiatric illnesses that have twice deprived me of my freedom (once in civil law, once in the criminal justice system, from which I am now free without conviction, but with a falsley reported warning to contend) but will that be enough to protect me? I do not know. I no longer have freedom and a sense of safety in my own country. Now I look over my shoulder waiting for abuse of myself by the medical profession as it has now on two significant occasions needlessly done. Do you think they must have had cause? They did not.
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And back now to the criminal justice system and the sentence for harassment without violence. The person in prison is still a human being and may refuse medication and build a relationship with a doctor. The person in the secure hospital may not refuse medication and has no control over their own body. Same crime, different outcomes.
The Grand National this year (2008) was won by a horse called "Comply or Die". Perhaps for the supposedly mentally ill held in secure hospitals the horse ought to have been called "Comply and Die".
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