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.