Tuesday 19 July 2011

Reasonable doubt, law and mental health law

In those TV legal dramas I watch they go on about reasonable doubt. If
reasonable doubt exists then a person is innocent in a criminal trial.

Reasonable doubt is not exercised in mental health diagnosis and
treatment, though the outcomes can be similar. People lose their
liberty. They can be removed from society or perhaps more importantly
their individuality can be removed from existence. This is all possible
without any of the judiciary process of criminal law in the US, UK and
other countries.

People can die in hospitals. They can be killed slowly and quickly by
their treatments but all because it is doctors doing it. There is
clearly in sufficient oversight and as the past has shown mental health
diagnosis can be used for non-medical purposes. In fact the entire
system need not have ended up the purview of doctors. This is a quirk of
history and it makes it so fucking hard for me to do what I have to do
but what happens to the mentally ill and is allowed to by the medical
and legal profession is an injustice and a cruelty which can not
continue, even if the medical profession think they've been doing a good
thing.

Reasonable doubt. There is more than enough reasonable doubt that mental
illness is an illness. I think there's a sociological and a
progressive/fringe view which can cast enough doubt on treatments and
the medicalisation and the very nature of the laws used to incarcerate,
control and subjugate the mentally ill.

If there is doubt that it is a real illness then there is a significant
danger in calling it one. The danger is what we face in the present. We
face the problems of the Mental health act 1983 amended in 2007 and the
problem of all the previous legal instruments which allowed the
subjugation of types of people having to force themselves to live
through what ever shitty time they live in. The systems afford to
criminals, the protects and rights and moral codes of justice, are only
recently being partially extended to psychiatric patients.

They are still not afforded the protection of innocent until proven
guilty. They are not given the privilege of reasonable doubt and a
robust scientific method of accurate diagnosis. The very application of
the paradigm of illness may be total bullshit and if it is then the
entire medico-legal framework is total bullshit.

This crime against humanity can no longer be perpetrated. Reasonable
fucking doubt. Fuck. How did people forget? Because we're fucking mad
and people still think we're subhuman. Fuck.

reasonable fucking doubt.

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We It comes in part from an appreciation that no one can truly sign their own work. Everything is many influences coming together to the one moment where a work exists. The other is a begrudging acceptance that my work was never my own. There is another consciousness or non-corporeal entity that helps and harms me in everything I do. I am not I because of this force or entity. I am "we"