I'm against psychiatric rights...

...because I think rights should be for all people.

This is where I part company with many disability campaigners but I
think I gain solidarity with a lot of people with disabilities. People
are equal. Any law that separates us, even if it advantages us above the
'not us' (conceptually the group that the law doesn't need to apply to),
reinforces the divides between different human beings.

When you consider human rights they're not very good. They're based on
the needs of the powerful in society. The dominant tribe or the largest
group decided that liberty could be taken away from people who had
committed no major crime nor were they any threat. Vagrants, addicts and
those of unsound mind aren't protected from incarceration the same way
the rest of the human race was.

Psychiatric patients around the world are treated like animals even to
this day. The same is true of the homeless and the drug addicts. There
re some basic rights that are missing from human rights law. The Human
Rights Act doesn't go far enough.

The rights of psychiatric patients and the mentally ill are intertwined
with human rights because of the simple fact that we're all human. The
Human Rights Act makes exceptions for those of unsound mind.

Capacity and true insanity are wavering states. People change and can go
from deeply insightful and rational to incoherent and rational to
irrational states during their lifetime. A moment of madness can give a
person the label of an unsound mind for life but this is not true. Most
people at some point in their life will go through an irrational state
of mind, defined as irrational by psychiatric diagnosis (though in
psychiatric thinking there may be some people who are undiagnosed but
still 'ill'). A lifetime estimate for this from an American paper is
over 50% of people will experience a common mental disorder at some
point in their life. The commonality of irrationality is thereby a
normal and human experience, in my opinion.

The rights of the worst off - those with the fewest rights - is an
important measure of society as is the lives of the poorest, the worst
treated and the most disadvantaged.