Human rights? Not in mental health.

There are significant differences in treatment choices for people with
physical and mental illnesses. A person with a physical health problem
can refuse certain treatments whereas the Mental Health Act (even the
amended one) gives little option for some people. In fact it has a new
control outside the psychiatric hospital: Supervised Community
Treatment. This is essentially a form of psychiatric parole to ensure
people keep taking their medication. The threat is return to the
confines of the psychiatric ward.

The justifications for the SCT (or Community Treatment Order - the
language changes) is the risk of murder by someone off medication. Te
risk of suicide is irrelevant to the public compared to the risk of
homicide. It removes the right of choice from people in the community.
It has been significantly overused - by 1000% - and is disproportionally
used on Black people (and no one gives a fucking shit).

I believe people have the right to chose their treatment. I believe that
there is sufficient challenging evidence to support that idea that the
science of psychiatry is not medicine nor science. It is enough to make
the biomedical model a hypothesis rather than a fact. People should have
the right to chose their psychiatric journey - treatment as usual;
treatment with minimal medication; self-medication; no medication. They
should have access to talking rather than drugging. They should never
have treatments like ECT forced upon them.

The problem is the idea of an unsound mind. This is an exclusion from
the right of liberty in the Human Rights Act. It is clearly an exclusion
from choice in healthcare but I'd challenge that because many people can
make better choices about their treatment, and there is evidence to
suggest that the psychiatric paradigm may be producing worse results
however it is only through awareness of history that this can be seen
with clarity.

It will be in 50 or 100 years when organisations like Mind Freedom, the
survivor movement and mad pride will be recognised for being the only
groups that got it right when it came to ethics and mental healthcare,
however in the intervening years many people will suffer through
psychiatric abuse, many years will be lost in life expectancy and the
will be a huge loss to the richness of the human race because of the
lack of diversity.