Coercive psychiatry should be abolished

I WAS interested to read your editorial (Irish Examiner, November 28) on the new independent review panels for involuntarily detained patients.

I don’t believe these panels represent an advance at all for the human rights of those detained against their will. If a person has not infringed another’s human rights or committed a crime, then that person should not be deprived of their civil liberties in the first place. Much behaviour that results in a psychiatric assessment that someone should be detained is not, in fact, law-breaking. Behaviour that is legal, if non-conformist, should not be made into mental illness in order to justify detention. People must have this fundamental human right protected. When a person is committed they can also be forced to take psychiatric drugs against their will or undergo electroconvulsive ‘therapy’.

Coercive psychiatry should be abolished. Even today, human rights organisations like Amnesty International refuse to condemn this.