Political Crossfire Forums

Yes, I clearly answered it. You need a someone to petition, and then if their petition is valid, a court will examine. If you are determined to be a harm to yourself or others, then the judge can decide to commit you. Perfectly valid and I think it should actually be expanded. The petition should not require the petitioner to ACTUALLY SEE the patient try/threaten harm. It should be enough to simply file an affidavit saying you have a reasonable belief. Lanza's mom was in the process of trying to get him committed but because he didn't want to go, she had to fill out huge amounts of paperwork and wait for some instance of harm/threat of harm to file. If it was easier to do there is a good chance sandy hook could have been averted.

Look, the cops can detain you for a while without any real reason either. No reason it should be any different for mental patients. If you didn't have these laws people would just call the cops and get them arrested and held for 48 hours. At least this provides a mechanism to treat it as a medical issue instead of as a criminal issue. Anyway, the supreme court has looked at this issue a half a million times, there is zero chance it's unconstitutional and that's really the only way you could seek to limit such involuntary commitments. Policy won't change on this and actually will almost certainly shift in the direction of making involuntary commitment easier, given things like Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, and all the future shootings that will no doubt be done by lunatics who refuse to get treatment.

It's also really not that pervasive of a problem. 2.5 Million is an absurd number and obviously there is a reason you didn't include that link. IN fact, the data clearly shows that the US has done an EXCELLENT job of getting people to voluntarily commit. In the past, as recently as ww2, almost all mental commitments were involuntary. Today it's not even close to 50%. We are making progress in all the right areas. We are not letting lunatics run wild because a foreigner thinks it's a civil liberties violations.

Excellent post. It wasn't long ago that homosexuals, anarchists and pacifists were being thrown into asylums and forced into extremely harmful treatment. The annals of medical history is overflowing with the most disturbing, violent and repressive behaviour the world has ever seen.

Many problems we face, such as depression and suicidal thoughts, really seem to spawn from the type of meaningless existence we force children and adults into. We have made authenticity, childhood, and plain old individuality into mental illnesses. Mass killings are, historically, just something that happens at more or less the same frequency. Given the enormous access to health care we have already, I don't see how people will be made any less likely to have a psychotic episode because they were 72-hour-caught-and-released. And what about the civil liberties of the mentally ill? If there is a 10% chance I'll snap violently, should I be locked up? How about a 5% chance?

i think we've come a long way though from burning these people alive in the town square to simply medicating them.