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Comment by mc_hammer | Hacker News Reader

they tried castration, lobotomy, and drilling a hole in the persons skull to drain the blood (they had no power tools so a hand crank drill)

on children. on teenagers. on the old. and on the stupid.

to cure voices...

you dont know what your talking about guys.

were talking about elective surgeries, that people could not refuse, and testified later to the supreme court they were done without permission, and sometimes tortured or beaten if refusing the surgery.

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I didn't say they weren't barbaric but this isn't about them, it's about your behavior; you're being a bigot. Gay is not an insult, don't use it as such and think you can preach from any high ground.

Agreed but it's a pity the only response is reacting to the homophobic slur here; it is truly criminal and worth talking about how much leeway pseudo-scientific "doctors" are given, to this day, to abuse the human rights of those different enough to be deemed "mentally unsound".

It's not a pity at all, someone spouting hatred doesn't deserve to be heard until he learns to stop spouting hatred.

No. That is the method of problem solving espoused by Jerry Springer culture. It is literally beneath HN.

In the US at least, a mentally ill person can only be committed against their will if they are deemed an active threat to themselves of others, and it has been that way for decades. The days of involuntary in-patient institutions are largely over.

In many cases this is basically a rubber stamp. I know several people who were committed against their will after as little as a cursory 5 minute conversation. To anyone who knew them at all, they pretty clearly weren't violent or a threat to others. Another person I knew was hospitalized for a suicide attempt, at which the doctors, for no particular reason and with no evidence, assumed she must be hearing voices, and had her on anti-psychotics for around a week before her family managed to convince them otherwise.

Clinical psychologists and psychiatrists weld a frightening amount of power over the people who may not be aware of just how easy it is to be locked up for seeking any kind of help or therapy. At this point, I consider pretty much any contact with clinical psychs to be every bit as dangerous as talking to a cop without a lawyer.

I'm sorry you've had this impression. It's not just violence, most of the time people are involuntarily committed if they are suicidal. I obviously have limited information, but perhaps those doctors who gave your friend anti-psychotics thought he/she was bipolar, or was not responding to anti-depressants? The atypical anti-psychotics are often the standard treatment for bipolar disorder, and are also used in cases of depression if SSRIs do not work.

Again, I'm sorry you have gotten this impression. Both my parents are clinical psychologists; I can assure you that these cases are taken very seriously, and committing a patient is always a measure of last resort.

> I know several people who were committed against their will after as little as a cursory 5 minute conversation.

Not to call you a liar, but quite simply I don't believe that. Having dealt with wanting to get someone committed against their will, I found it was all but impossible unless they're actively and obviously dangerous to themselves or others.

> Clinical psychologists and psychiatrists weld a frightening amount of power

They really don't. They can't just commit people because they talked to them and decided hey lock that guy up.

> They can't just commit people because they talked to them and decided hey lock that guy up.

They're free to assess you however they want and then use that as an excuse. Who is going to argue with and stop them? The judge? Your lawyer? Someone else who lacks a medical degree and "psychiatric expertise"?

There are so many ways it can go wrong for you. Maybe they thought you said something you didn't. I was once accused of making suicidal statements that I never did - not even a matter of being misheard, but completely making up things that I had never said. Maybe you just seem twitchy or distracted or they think they see signs of some other symptom. Maybe they just decide to lie because they think they know best.

I'm not claiming that every psych is out to get you, just that you really roll the dice when you talk to an unknown one. Hence the comparison to dealing with police. From my own experiences and people I've known, it gets worse when you aren't involved of your own free will or aren't the one directly paying for your own treatment.

In your case, I'd be curious whether whichever working clinical psychiatrist that was assigned to this person also felt as strongly that they should be committed, and had similar lack of success doing so?

Some non-anecdotal evidence either way would be more convincing, but this is the impression I've gotten considering the uniformity of experiences I've observed. Only one person I can think of actually felt they were helped by and had a positive experience with a psychiatric institution, and that was through a college health service. The only paper[1] I could find on it reports that "retrospectively, between 33% and 81% of patients regard the admission as justified and/or the treatment as beneficial," which is a uselessly broad range and could be used to conclude either way.

[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0447.2006....

I think you're remembering a time long past. The system doesn't work that way anymore. Committing someone against their will is no longer trivial or easy if even possible. You have to have evidence and it has to be an immediate threat like within a few days and it's f'ing hard. These people do not have the power you think they do anymore. The thing you're complaining about has already been fixed.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/07/mental-...

You don't know what you're talking about. Joe Asshole can't lock random people in the hospital on psychiatric hold, but a psychiatrist can.

Only for a very short time and only with evidence they're a danger, and we aren't talking about joe asshole, and I know as much what I'm talking about as you do buddy. This isn't the world where a psychiatrist has that much unchecked power; it isn't the movies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft#Raid_and_in...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kamilah-brock-nypd-bmw_u...

Two instances of police corruption that have no relevance to this thread. In neither of those cases was the psychiatrist responsible and in both cases they were released within days. Dirty cops telling lies cause all sorts of problems, that's on them.

Police officers, whether dirty or clean, cannot commit anyone. In both cases the psychiatrist was responsible.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/woman-interest-clippers-...

They can lie to psychiatrists to get a temporary commit which is what happened in both of those cases, and yet again you link to something that only shows a few day temporary hold; that does not support your case. You cannot commit someone for more than a few days against their will and that fact alone demonstrates that psychiatrists do not have very much power anymore.

It varies by state, but I just looked up New York, California, and Texas and they are surprisingly uniform. Getting a 72-hour hold is pretty easy, and a psychiatrist can tell the court if s/he deems it necessary to hold for an additional 14 days (ostensibly, so they can verify that whatever medication they choose to administer has taken effect). These courts are pretty much set up to rubber stamp whatever the psychiatrist wants to do; many hospitals that have psychiatric services have these courts in the same facility. After that, although the patient has the right to leave the hospital whenever they want, but in many cases they aren't told that, or that they may need to call a lawyer to take them court in order for the judge to issue a release.

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