Forcing someone to undergo potentially mind-altering medical treatment (because they absolutely will drug someone who fights against being there) and probably abuse (just check the stats) at the hands of the system isn’t humanitarian either.
This is one of those situations where all you can really do is make sure the options are as good as they can be, so people want to choose to get help, and we are not even remotely doing that.
Severely mentally ill people don’t want to choose help, that’s a function of being severely mentally ill. Leaving the decision making to people fundamentally incapable of making a decision actively harms them.
If the system was actually helpful to people, and severely ill patients still didn’t want help, you might have a point. Right now though, the system doesn’t help most people, it harms them actively, so we don’t actually know how many people would still refuse quality care.
And let’s be serious here, the number of people so mentally ill they can’t be trusted to make a decision about whether or not to take offered help…? Really really small percentage. We definitely shouldn’t be structuring the entire system based on edge cases, even if those edge cases have a legitimate need for that sort of inhumane treatment (a premise I strongly question).
Yes, however it’s mostly a refutation to your prior comment that severely mentally ill people refuse treatment as a direct consequence of being mentally ill. This is only rarely the case. The vast majority of those severely mentally ill people are still people capable of learning about stuff and doing cost-benefit analysis for their own lives. They make rational decisions to the best of their ability. This ability may be flawed, but that’s the case for all people. Nobody has a pure, 100% complete and accurate view of things.
They refuse treatment largely because the system is horrible. Would they still refuse if the system wasn’t horrible? Most of them probably would not, because struggling is really hard. Most of them would get themselves the help they feel they need if they honestly thought there would be a good outcome.
But what they think they need and what the system or society thinks they need aren’t necessarily the same thing. Maybe all they really -need- is a place to exist exactly as they are, with zero medical intervention, with a clean environment where they feel safe and secure. If that’s all you felt you needed, would you risk being drugged for the rest of your life? I sure as hell wouldn’t, no matter how bad my experience of existence is. At least I have agency.
And honestly until we reach that point, where mental healthcare is supportive to the individual and genuinely helps them live whatever they feel is a fulfilling life, discussing what to do with the minuscule remaining fraction of sufferers (a number we genuinely can’t even quantify at this point) is sort of dumb, and seems like a pretty big distraction from doing anything better for everyone who isn’t in that camp.
They percieve the system as being horrible, but again, that’s a function of their mental illness.
The system does have problems, but there’s no refuting the fact that whatever problems the system has, it’s infinitely better than an amputee with an infected leg sitting in the dirt with no shelter.
I personally would rather be an amputee on the side of the road with no shelter than be kept prisoner in my own body with the use of drugs and restraints. That’s literally my worst nightmare. And I’m not “severely mentally ill”.
You don’t know what reasons she has for doing what she does, but what IS completely, abundantly, crystal clear, is that she herself considers the position she is presently in to be better than whatever she would potentially deal with under care. And you don’t know why she came to this conclusion. Maybe she was institutionalized when she was young and was abused or whatever and has ptsd about it. Maybe she knows someone else who was.
Or yeah, maybe she’s so mentally ill that it’s forcing her to deny care. I strongly doubt it, but maybe. And we’ll never know unless we fix everything else first. So. Kinda moot point, isn’t it?
Forcing someone to undergo potentially mind-altering medical treatment (because they absolutely will drug someone who fights against being there) and probably abuse (just check the stats) at the hands of the system isn’t humanitarian either.
This is one of those situations where all you can really do is make sure the options are as good as they can be, so people want to choose to get help, and we are not even remotely doing that.
Severely mentally ill people don’t want to choose help, that’s a function of being severely mentally ill. Leaving the decision making to people fundamentally incapable of making a decision actively harms them.
If the system was actually helpful to people, and severely ill patients still didn’t want help, you might have a point. Right now though, the system doesn’t help most people, it harms them actively, so we don’t actually know how many people would still refuse quality care.
And let’s be serious here, the number of people so mentally ill they can’t be trusted to make a decision about whether or not to take offered help…? Really really small percentage. We definitely shouldn’t be structuring the entire system based on edge cases, even if those edge cases have a legitimate need for that sort of inhumane treatment (a premise I strongly question).
That’s an argument to fix the system, which I 110% agree with. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get people the help they need.
Yes, however it’s mostly a refutation to your prior comment that severely mentally ill people refuse treatment as a direct consequence of being mentally ill. This is only rarely the case. The vast majority of those severely mentally ill people are still people capable of learning about stuff and doing cost-benefit analysis for their own lives. They make rational decisions to the best of their ability. This ability may be flawed, but that’s the case for all people. Nobody has a pure, 100% complete and accurate view of things.
They refuse treatment largely because the system is horrible. Would they still refuse if the system wasn’t horrible? Most of them probably would not, because struggling is really hard. Most of them would get themselves the help they feel they need if they honestly thought there would be a good outcome.
But what they think they need and what the system or society thinks they need aren’t necessarily the same thing. Maybe all they really -need- is a place to exist exactly as they are, with zero medical intervention, with a clean environment where they feel safe and secure. If that’s all you felt you needed, would you risk being drugged for the rest of your life? I sure as hell wouldn’t, no matter how bad my experience of existence is. At least I have agency.
And honestly until we reach that point, where mental healthcare is supportive to the individual and genuinely helps them live whatever they feel is a fulfilling life, discussing what to do with the minuscule remaining fraction of sufferers (a number we genuinely can’t even quantify at this point) is sort of dumb, and seems like a pretty big distraction from doing anything better for everyone who isn’t in that camp.
They percieve the system as being horrible, but again, that’s a function of their mental illness.
The system does have problems, but there’s no refuting the fact that whatever problems the system has, it’s infinitely better than an amputee with an infected leg sitting in the dirt with no shelter.
I do refute that “fact”, though.
I personally would rather be an amputee on the side of the road with no shelter than be kept prisoner in my own body with the use of drugs and restraints. That’s literally my worst nightmare. And I’m not “severely mentally ill”.
You don’t know what reasons she has for doing what she does, but what IS completely, abundantly, crystal clear, is that she herself considers the position she is presently in to be better than whatever she would potentially deal with under care. And you don’t know why she came to this conclusion. Maybe she was institutionalized when she was young and was abused or whatever and has ptsd about it. Maybe she knows someone else who was.
Or yeah, maybe she’s so mentally ill that it’s forcing her to deny care. I strongly doubt it, but maybe. And we’ll never know unless we fix everything else first. So. Kinda moot point, isn’t it?