No justification for involuntary interventions

YOUR editorial (Irish Examiner, February 13) expressed the hope that issues around the detention of those diagnosed as ‘mentally ill’ would be resolved soon and that mental health tribunals would be able to protect and serve the best interests of those detained.

It failed, though, to address a fundamental and global human rights abuse routinely carried out by apologists for psychiatric coercion. People regarded as mentally ill are incarcerated despite not having committed any crime or having infringed upon anyone’s human rights.

When a person is incarcerated in a psychiatric institution and is forcibly subjected to harmful physical interventions with powerful psychiatric drugs and electroconvulsive ‘therapy’, this can rightly be considered torture.

Psychiatric coercive ‘treatment’ and incarceration should therefore be seen as torture contravening Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights where it states: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

Furthermore, there are no objective physically-based diagnostic tests (brain scan or chemical analysis of blood) which can prove any so-called mental illness exist. There is therefore no medical, moral, or legal justification for involuntary psychiatric interventions. They are crimes against humanity.

Sean Fleming

Cuan Glas

Bishop O’Donnell Road

Galway