Illness and crime

What happened with mental illness as a construct is it allowed compassion and leniency to be used for a certain group of people. This is the privilege of the invalid as Szasz termed it. Calling it an illness means compassion can be shown.

This is the problem of attacking the illness paradigm. With it comes the benefits. As well as all the terrible, horrible nasty stuff. In many ways the construct and the true concept have similarities.

In part it is about the loss of capacity. The problem is it can be faked and it can be misread or misrepresented. Punishments can be little different regardless of if it is prison or a psychiatric ward, though prisoners have more basic human rights and some prison facilities are better than some psychiatric ones.

The mentally ill who commit crimes are offered a different punishment, that of psychiatric care. Many prefer it and this is one of the benefits of the illness paradigm.

There are those who've committed no crime but are incarcerated in psychiatric wards. There are now people who can be hospitalised because they pose a risk of commiting a serious crime though have notcommitted one.

Crime has a huge and complex system to ensure justice. Psychiatry has the judgement of one person, little oversight and no concept of the wrong that is the punishment or medication of the innocent.

The chemical cosh is a punishment. Though patients are fooled into accepting treatment many through educating themselves independently can see through the fallacies which allow a punishment to be used as a health treatment.

Calling a behaviour an illness, then treating the behaviour rather than the illness but thereby inducing real illnesses...is also the job of psychiatry. The entire profession is a crime against the Hippocratic oath and the ideals we hold doctors by.

Several thousand old people with dementia would agree with me...but they're dead. They're dead because of their behaviour and the doctors who treated their behaviour with 'antipsychotics' which killed them quicker.

The importance is the difference between manslaughter and murder. These drugs have not been banned. The prescribers know the evidence as do the manufacturers and whatever body licenses them. They treat behaviour using drugs which reduce life expectancy. They know the research and they know 1,800 people a year were slaughtered when the mistake was made.

That, apparently isn't a crime in the UK. The doctors got away with a "doh!". Even national dementia charities didn't speak up against the slaughter. Nor the continued slaughter. The drugs are still used.